Asset Protection
A solid asset protection strategy can defend you from claims of creditors, give you peace of mind, and protect your assets from lawsuits. At Blake Harris Law, we provide asset protection solutions to clients throughout the world, helping them secure their financial future with the expertise of an experienced asset protection attorney
Our team works tirelessly to help you preserve your financial future and secure your personal and business assets.
What is Asset Protection?
Asset protection is a set of legal strategies used to shield your property from potential claims and lawsuits. These strategies can vary depending on your specific needs and assets, as well as the jurisdiction you’re in.
For example, the homestead exemption protects family residences from creditors in many states, while a Limited Liability Company (LLC) can separate personal assets from business liabilities. Asset protection tools are designed to make it difficult for creditors to access your property.
Examples of asset protection tools:
- Homestead Exemption: Protects personal homes in many states.
- LLCs: Protect business owners from liabilities arising from business debts.
- Asset Protection Trusts: Used to transfer assets to a trust that shields them from creditors.
An offshore trust is a particularly powerful asset protection tool, allowing you to transfer ownership of assets to a trust managed by a professional trustee in a foreign jurisdiction. This adds an additional layer of protection, as these trusts are harder for creditors to access.
Other asset protection strategies include domestic trusts, retirement accounts, annuities, and cash-value life insurance policies. Consulting an experienced asset protection lawyer can help you determine the best strategy to safeguard your property.
Why You Should Consider Asset Protection
A comprehensive asset protection plan can help you:
- Protect Your Property from Creditor Claims: Once you transfer assets to an asset protection trust, the trust itself becomes the owner, making it difficult for creditors to access the property.
- Reduce Liability for Business Debts
By forming the right business structure, such as an LLC or corporation, you limit your personal liability for business debts. This way, your business risks do not jeopardize your personal assets or affect your credit score.
- Defend Against Professional Lawsuits: Professionals in high-risk fields like medicine, law, and engineering may face lawsuits that exceed their liability insurance. Asset protection strategies can provide added protection to shield your wealth in such scenarios.
- Providing for your family: Protecting your estate through trusts ensures your family receives as much of your wealth as possible, even in the event of creditors or lawsuits, both during your life and after.
- Preserving financial security: Whether you’re facing the uncertainty of divorce or the risk of bankruptcy, a well-structured asset protection strategy can help you maintain your financial stability and safeguard your wealth during difficult times.
Why Choose Blake Harris for Your Asset Protection?
Attorney Blake Harris is passionate about helping you protect your assets from lawsuits. Before founding Blake Harris Law, Blake worked for one of the largest wealth management firms in the United States where he helped high/ultra-high-net-worth clients protect their personal assets. Since then, Blake has gained extensive experience in all areas of asset protection and has assisted clients worldwide with asset protection planning.
Over the years, Blake has built and continues to nurture a vast network of legal and finance professionals in countries such as Belize, the Cayman Islands, the Cook Islands, Lichtenstein, New Zealand, Panama, St. Kitts and Nevis, and Switzerland. Blake’s knowledge, experience, and connections enable him to handle even the most complex and sensitive asset protection issues other attorneys may find challenging or are unwilling to represent. Whether you are looking to set up an offshore trust, establish a foreign limited liability company, or protect your digital assets, Blake will work hard to protect your wealth.
Why is Asset Protection necessary?
It is unfortunate that we live in such a litigious society where a person is never more than one mistake away from having everything that he/she has worked for put at risk in a lawsuit. Alternatively, creditors can try to take away assets for various reasons. Given the volatility of business fortunes, people occasionally make mistakes that potentially threaten their long-term financial future.
When your insurance has policy limits or will not cover claims filed against you, it will be your assets that are at risk in a lawsuit. When someone obtains a judgment against you, it will be your assets that they are able to come after to satisfy the judgment. While some categories of assets are off limits to judgment holders, almost everything else is fair game. This means what you have could become what they have with a few strokes of the pen.
If you work in a profession that is prone to lawsuits, this is even more of a risk for you. For example, if you have a professional practice, your malpractice insurance may only provide so much protection. Similarly, if you are starting a business and have to guarantee your loans, you may also be at risk of losing your assets if things do not work out as you hope.
Asset protection means things do not have to be this way, and you do not need to place yourself at the same degree of risk. Through various proactive steps you can take ahead of time, you can build a proverbial fence around most of your assets to keep them out of the hands of creditors and judgment holders. Once a case goes to court, you have little to no control over the outcome and whether everything you have worked for will be threatened. Asset protection is advisable to give you peace of mind.
What does it mean to protect your assets?
Protecting your assets means taking legal steps to keep them safe from creditors and lawsuits. This can involve changing the ownership structure of your assets or transferring ownership to entities that limit your liability. For example, transferring real estate into a trust or using LLCs to separate personal and business assets.
Effective asset protection planning can provide peace of mind and ensure that your assets remain secure, even if you face legal challenges.
While there are no guarantees in the practice of law, proper planning can give you much greater peace of mind that your assets will remain secure if ever threatened. When done effectively, asset protection greatly limits the amount of assets that judgment holders can get from you. It is important to remember asset protection steps must be taken within the confines of the law and are completely legal so long as they are done properly.
When protecting your assets, your attorney will scrutinize the laws of various states and offshore jurisdictions to form a strategy for where to hold your assets and who should exercise control over them. Asset protection makes as many of your assets as unreachable as possible. Thus, even if you transfer control of your assets to someone else, you still benefit from them, but no one else can without your consent.
What do you want to protect?
After a lifetime of work, you will hopefully have a number of different assets and properties you will want to keep safe from creditors using asset protection. To devise the strongest possible asset protection strategy, it is helpful to know ahead of time exactly what you want to protect. Then, working with an asset protection attorney, you want to figure out which of these assets are already protected by law and which assets you need to take steps to protect.
The good news is that in many states, one of the most important assets of all—your home—may already receive some degree of protection from creditors due to homestead exemptions. Hopefully, you have other assets in your portfolio besides your home. For example, you may have other investments, including stock market investments and cryptocurrency, that do not fall under any exemption.
You may have various assets that need protection, such as:
- Real Estate: Your home may already have some protection due to homestead exemptions, but you may need additional strategies for other properties.
- Bank Accounts: Liquid assets are often targeted by creditors, so transferring money into accounts that are legally protected is crucial.
- Investments: Stocks, bonds, and cryptocurrency require specific asset protection strategies to shield them from legal risks.
- Retirement Accounts: While some retirement accounts have statutory protections, they may still be vulnerable in certain situations. An asset protection attorney can help you maximize the protection of these funds.
By working with an experienced asset protection attorney, you can develop a plan that covers all these assets and more.
How does Asset Protection work?
To establish a successful asset protection plan, the first step is consulting with an experienced asset protection attorney. At Blake Harris Law, we will help you determine the most effective strategy for your situation. Here’s how it typically works:
- Consultation and Strategy: We begin by understanding your needs and assets, then recommend a tailored plan.
- Implementing Protection: This may involve transferring assets into trusts, setting up LLCs, and relocating financial assets to protected accounts.
Ongoing Monitoring: Asset protection is an ongoing process. We help you adjust your strategy as your financial situation evolves.
Asset Protection Strategies
Effective asset protection is achieved through a combination of strategies, including:
- Insurance: While insurance is a fundamental component of asset protection, it’s important to recognize its limitations. Insurance policies have caps, and once those limits are exceeded, your assets could be at risk. That’s why it’s important to implement other strategies in addition to insurance.
- Limited Liability Companies (LLC): An LLC can protect your business assets by limiting personal liability. If your business faces a lawsuit, creditors can only go after the LLC’s assets, not your personal wealth.
- Trusts: A trust can transfer ownership of assets to a trustee, providing separation between you and your assets. Offshore trusts, in particular, offer enhanced protection, making it extremely difficult for creditors to access assets held in foreign jurisdictions.
- Moving Assets to Protected Accounts: Certain financial assets, such as retirement accounts or life insurance policies, may enjoy statutory protections from creditors. By placing assets in these accounts, you add another layer of defense against lawsuits.
Can a Trust protect assets from a lawsuit?
A trust is a legal instrument, so naturally the answer to this question is it depends. When structured the right way and in the proper time frame, a trust should provide you with asset protection from lawsuits and creditors. Importantly, the trust must be designed in such a way that there is separation between you and the assets. In most cases, this means you need to transfer some degree of control over the assets to a trustee even while you maintain beneficial ownership. If you retain direct power to control your assets, the courts will likely find your trust instrument to be a legal fiction. A successful trust depends on creating some degree of separation between you and the trust assets.
The most important aspect of a trust able to provide legal protection of your assets is that the trust is irrevocable. This does not necessarily mean the trust cannot be undone or modified. Rather, trust assets would be unreachable by creditors since they would not really be taking them from you. When a trust is revocable, creditors can still reach it because you have the direct power to undo the trust and take back the assets. Even if you are the beneficiary of the irrevocable trust, it is the transfer of control of the assets to the trustee that legally separates you from your assets. Exactly how much protection is provided by a trust depends on the law of the jurisdiction where it was established. Some asset protection attorneys advise you to establish a trust in certain overseas jurisdictions since it is nearly impossible for creditors to reach assets held there.
Let’s Have a Talk
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Asset Protection FAQs
Look for an attorney with specialized experience in asset protection. They should understand the complexities involved and have a proven track record in this field.
The trust protector should be an independent party who can oversee the trustee’s actions and ensure the trust operates in accordance with your wishes. This person must be impartial and trustworthy.
You can place your real estate into a trust or LLC, which separates ownership and shields the property from creditors.
Common threats include lawsuits, creditor claims, divorce settlements, and bankruptcy. Having an asset protection strategy in place can reduce these risks.
By setting up a robust asset protection plan that includes insurance, trusts, LLCs, and other legal strategies, you can shield your wealth from potential threats.
LLCs and irrevocable trusts are the most commonly used structures. The best option depends on the nature of your assets and the risks involved.
Yes, offshore trusts can offer stronger protection from creditors, particularly in jurisdictions with strong privacy and asset protection laws.
Contact Blake Harris Law for Asset Protection
Ready to protect your assets? Contact Blake Harris Law today to schedule a consultation with an experienced asset protection attorney. Whether you’re looking to create a trust, form an LLC, or explore offshore solutions, Blake Harris has the expertise to help you safeguard your wealth.