Andrew and Todd Perry

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Andrew Perry, left, and his brother, Todd, photographed in their Short Hills, New Jersey, office, grew up in Margate, New Jersey. Now, as a financial advisory team, the two made Barron’s annual list of the nation’s leading 100 financial advisers this year.

Photography: 
John Emerson

Their partnership started on the Little League field in their hometown of Margate, New Jersey. “He was the pitcher and I was the catcher,” says Andrew Perry.

“He was very good at managing games,” says Todd Perry. “I just happened to have a lively arm.”

It continued on the baseball team at Atlantic City High School where, says Todd RC’89, “we got a very good street-smart education very quickly that helped us in life a lot.” It then moved north to Rutgers University–New Brunswick, where they each worked as waiters to help pay their way, and each belonged to Kappa Sigma. And it continues now in the highest reaches of Wall Street, where they are partners in the Perry Group at UBS Private Wealth Management, managing $16 billion in assets and making regular appearances on Barron’s annual list of the nation’s top financial advisers. On the financial publication’s 2014 Top 100 list, Andrew was ranked 32nd and Todd was ranked 47th.

“As a kid, I was always saying, ‘Hey, someday I’m going to be on Wall Street, and I’m going to wear a suit and tie and carry a briefcase. That’s all I kind of knew coming out of Rutgers,” says Andrew RC’87, who majored in economics, but also learned plenty from his jobs pumping gas, cleaning boats, and working in a bakery and as a busboy and bouncer. “You can’t rely on, ‘I went to a fancy school. I came from fancy money.’ You have to rely on yourself.”

Todd majored in English and communication, and he held a string of similar jobs: dishwasher in a Chinese restaurant, bartender, and a deliveryman for Cluck-U Chicken. “Our parents were very much in the camp of, ‘We do ok as a middle-class family, but you guys are going to work from day one,’” Todd says.

After graduation, Andrew worked as a retail broker before he was accepted into the highly selective and rigorous training program at Salomon Brothers. Todd worked in the health care industry before entering a similarly elite training program at Lehman Brothers. “They were from all the top M.B.A. programs in the country, and there’s me from Rutgers,” Todd says.

“The theme for us is underdogs,” Andrew says. “We came from modest beginnings, and there are a lot of kids out there that are the same.” This is why they established a scholarship for a student-athlete from southern New Jersey, the Perry Family Football Scholarship. Andrew is a regular at Rutgers football games; Todd is more often found at Rutgers basketball games.

Andrew lives in Short Hills, New Jersey, with his wife, whom he met in high school, and they have three children. Todd lives in Maplewood, New Jersey, with his wife, whom he met at Rutgers, and they have four children. And they spend much of each summer back in Margate, where each of them has a beach house. “Two blocks apart,” Todd says.

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