The Lawyer-Human Daily

People ask if they are guaranteed not to lose a single dollar if they invest in an asset protection plan. While that would be a nice guarantee, it is not how asset protection planning works. Your assets will be more protected from loss with a plan in place. Listen in to see what kind of guarantee you can get and how asset protection works with the threat of a lawsuit.

You might be wondering if you should put your car in an LLC or trust for asset protection. Unless the car is a very valuable collector item (that you do not drive often), you should not put a car in an asset protection structure.

One fundamental difference between offshore and domestic asset protection planning is the court systems. This might actually be the root cause for why so many people seek out asset protection planning in the first place. The US court system is built for and serves to allow plaintiff attorneys (contingency fee attorneys) to take hard-earned money away from others. The ever-growing flow of frivolous lawsuits in the US, led to the creation of offshore laws and courts that provide more protections to the successful people targeted by these baseless lawsuits.

A holding company is a common asset to have within an asset protection trust. The holding company can be beneficial for a number of reasons as we discuss in the video.

Setting up an asset protection trust involves a couple of steps. The first is creating the trust itself. That takes on average 2-3 weeks. Clients in a rush have created their trust within 3 days. The next step is "funding" the trust. That means putting your assets inside of the trust. How long this takes will depend on the number and type of assets you have. If you decide to open any offshore accounts, please budget 2 months for the bank to finalize everything.

While visiting a Cook Islands trustee office, I demonstrated to their team how I could easily look up US real estate ownership information online. They were blown away that our personal information is listed online for anyone to see. Why should someone have a right to know what home you own and where you live?

We speak to many people who want to remove their names from their real estate holdings for increased privacy and asset protection. It's not hard to do. The catch is that for real estate you already own in your name, you can't erase the record of ownership. There will still be a trace of when you owned the property. For true privacy in real estate, it works best if you never take ownership in your personal name.