Asset Protection for Business Owners: Learn How to Protect Everything You Own, From Everyone, Every Time

How will you protect your business and personal assets? This Friday at 10 a.m. PDT/ 1 p.m. EDT, you can hear Vistage Speaker Hillel L. Presser in his Fridays with Vistage webinar, “Asset Protection for the Business Owner: Learn How to Protect Everything You Own, From Everyone, Every time.”

Below is a preview of Hillel’s thought leadership.

While most business owners know how to make money, few know how to protect it. As threats to your wealth come from every direction and with lawsuits becoming the next biggest business, we challenge our business owners. For every 60 minutes you spend making money, spend 60 seconds thinking about how to protect it. Like most things in life, Asset Protection begins with a good plan.

What is Asset Protection?

Asset Protection is the legal process of titling both your personal and business assets to put them beyond the reach of future potential threats and creditors. A good Asset Protection plan should protect all of your assets from any and all financial threats. The real trick in today’s day and age is not to make money but to keep it.

Maxims for Protecting Your Assets

It is important to protect yourself before you get sued, proactive planning is important. You must think and act defensively to protect your wealth. Asset Protection is a form of insurance; buy it before you need it. Commit yourself to a financial self-defense plan to protect your assets before it’s too late. Protecting yourself takes time, effort and money, but protecting your assets is your best possible investment.

Start with a basic plan and add firewalls as needed. A customized Asset Protection plan is necessary for each specific situation. Your Asset Protection planner must give you a wide range of protective options, because any one firewall is only one possibility. No one firewall is everybody’s lawsuit-proofing answer. There is no cookie cutter ‘one size fits all’ plan. Everyone’s personal and business assets are different and everyone’s potential threats, creditors and liabilities are different. Each individual plan should be customized and tailored to fit your needs.

Basic Strategies

There are countless ways to protect your assets, but some of the most common include Exemption Laws, Protective Entities, Liens, and International Planning.

The simplest way to protect yourself is to personally own only assets with federal or state statutory protection against lawsuits or creditors. Maximize the use of exempt assets such as homestead, pensions and retirement funds, and life insurance.

Title your assets to protective entities. You and I are separate individuals with different social security numbers, if I get sued they can’t come after you, and if you get sued, they can’t come after me. Just like you and I, you and your protective entities are looked upon as different individuals as well. You have a social security number and your protective entities each have a different tax ID number. Liquid assets or real estate in your personal name can easily be lost in a lawsuit, while the same assets titled properly and proactively to a Domestic Asset Protection Limited Partnership, LLC, or other protective entity have great protection from creditors.

Protect with liens. What is a $100,000 car worth if you owe $95,000? Take out lines of credit. Record mortgages against your property and business. Make all of your assets valueless. Become an unattractive candidate for a lawsuit.

Consider International planning. You get the best protection when your assets are international for several reasons. Foreign Asset Protection jurisdictions do not recognize U.S. judgments, thus a creditor must re-litigate their case within that foreign jurisdiction. Many times, the statute of limitations to commence suit within that jurisdiction may have expired. The daunting beyond reasonable doubt evidence standard helps to explain why only fewer than 3 out of 100 judgment creditors even attempt to recover International wealth

Get A Great Night’s Sleep!

With a sound financial fortress you will be able to protect your hard-earned assets from lawyers, creditors, foreclosure deficiencies, former or current spouses, children, relatives, and lawsuit-obsessed citizens.