The Secret Asset Shield
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About this ebook
THE SECRET ASSET SHIELD is written for real estate investors. You need to know how to shield your real estate assets from lawsuits.
The first step in asset protection is educating yourself. In today's litigious world. One unexpected lawsuit can wipe out lifelong savings and all of your real estate assets. This book gives you the best strategies that are legal and effective and used by the best asset protection attorneys because they work.
Learn how to protect your personal residence with a simple land trust. Safeguard all your assets with the knowledge on how to use the cornerstones of asset protection that protect you with these benefits that include land trusts, limited liability companies, and family limited partnerships
If you care about privacy and protecting your hard-earned assets, this book is for you.
Some of the benefits you will receive from this book.
* Privacy * Avoiding Probate
* Avoiding Liability * Avoiding Due-on-sale
* Avoiding Liens * Avoiding Partitions
* Avoiding Litigation * Avoiding Partner Problems
Land Trust Agreement Included in Book (Legal in all 50 states)
Wayne Richardson
Wayne Richardson is a real estate investor in Raleigh, NC. He holds a B.A. degree in business administration from California Coast University and can be reached at [email protected]
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The Secret Asset Shield - Wayne Richardson
Chapter 1
Introduction
Congratulations! If you are reading this book, you are a fortunate person. If you own any real estate, and are considering investing in it, you belong in a very exclusive group. According to the IRS, less than 8% of all Americans who file a tax return, invest in income producing real estate. Hopefully, after reading this, you will be inspired to protect your personal residence and real estate investments, with this easy-to-use but powerful asset protection information.
My intentions for this book are to give the reader an in-depth understanding on the use of asset protection entities, and how to use them to avoid frivolous lawsuits. A large percentage of real investors may have heard of these entities, but do not have the knowledge on how to use them to protect their assets to the fullest.
In today’s litigious world, it’s important to understand that the fundamental purpose of asset protection is to shield assets from unforeseen attacks by dubious creditors or plaintiffs. If you ever get sued, and as a result you lose your home, car, bank accounts, and brokerage accounts, wouldn’t you have wished you’d done some planning on keeping your assets safe?
Asset protection means minimizing liabilities. It’s the legal process of titling both personal and business assets into entities. You are putting your assets beyond the reach of potential creditors and liabilities, while at the same time enjoying the benefits of those assets. The three entities that we use in asset protection for real estate, is the land trust, limited liability company, and family limited partnership. They all separate ownership, but still give you full control of the asset.
A lawsuit claim can be deleterious to a bright financial future. It really doesn’t matter what the circumstances are, no matter who’s at fault, a lawsuit will be expensive in time, money, and stress.
You either settle out of court, or fight it, never knowing how it will end up. You are always susceptible to a plaintiff’s lawsuit, if you own low-hanging fruit, which are assets that’s in your personal name.
A pending lawsuit can come from other businesses, employees, business partners, past marriages, relatives and especially tenants living in your real estate investments.
With a little knowledge of how to search, and access to an internet, anyone can discover almost all of your personal information. This includes your real estate, cars, boats, bank and investment accounts.
It is unfortunate that we live in such a sue-happy society where we are never more than one mistake away from putting a lifetime of work at risk. Given the volatility of running any business, and especially operating real estate, people will occasionally make mistakes that can potentially threaten their long-term financial future, and many pay that price each day. If your insurance policy is not large enough to cover a judgment claim, it will be your assets that are at risk in the event of a lawsuit.
This could mean, what you have, could become what they have, in the event of a lawsuit. In simple terms, asset protection means separating ownership from assets. Through various proactive steps that need to be taken ahead of time, you can build a shield around your assets. The hope is to discourage attempts of being sued in the first place, by having your assets invisible to the public eye, and judgment proof.
Once a case goes to court, you have little to no control over the outcome, and can only wonder if the judge is going to take everything that you have worked hard for. Asset protection is a must in order to give yourself the peace of mind you deserve, when you lay your head down each night to sleep.
Protecting your assets means that you preserve them for both your personal use, and for the use of family in later generations. By taking a few of these asset protection steps, you can change the form of ownership of your assets, and make it difficult for creditors to reach. These structures will create some separation between you and your assets, that limits your amount of liability in the event of a lawsuit.
There’s never a magic wand that will give you absolute protection over every asset that you own. But you want to use the best strategies possible to protect as many assets as you can. It is important to remember that asset protection steps have to be established before any lawsuit claim is filed against you.
This is the reason why this is important in establishing asset protection in advance.
Your options are very limited, once a lawsuit has been filed. Any transfer of property after a lawsuit, could be construed as a fraudulent transfer by the courts, and be undone. You may think that your wealth is safe, and you don’t need asset protection. But my friend, that’s living in a delusional world. For every 60 minutes you spend making money, spend 60 seconds thinking about how you can protect it
CHAPTER 2
Unfortunate Events
Just look at the recent deadly event of Alec Baldwin’s tragic mistake on 10/ 21/ 2021. When thinking a prop gun had blanks in it, he fired it when practicing a scene, and accidently killed Halynn Hutchinson on the movie set. Since the shooting, Baldwin has been named as a defendant in multiple lawsuits filed over the tragedy, including a wrongful death suit filed by Hutchens husband, Matthew Hutchens.
This will create unimaginable lawsuits for him and many other people that were there doing their assigned jobs.
For example, on 02/04/ 2022, Yahoo News, reported that Cherlyn Schaefer, a medic on the set of Rust, where the Hutchinson incident happened, has filed a negligent lawsuit against the production company, Baldwin, and four crew members working with her on the set because of the tremendous trauma she suffered.
According to her lawsuit, for an undisclosed dollar amount, she cannot return to work again as a medic, because she was so traumatized by Hutchinson’s death. She incurred "lost earnings, earning health capacity expenses, emotional trauma and suffering, and loss of enjoyment of life. It added that she is undergoing medical treatment and professional therapy.
Then another tragic event happened at Travis Scott’s deadly music concert where ten people were crushed to death on 10/ 5/ 2021. A follow up on the incident, reported by Buzzfeed News, on 02/02/ 2022, stated that over 400 individually filed lawsuits were seeking billions of dollars in damages after the Astroworld tragedy.
Both of these famous people are subject to losing all of their net worth with the billions of dollars of negligent lawsuits that are filed against them. Not counting the time and stress on a person’s health on having to deal with such unexpected tragic events.
Son’s Car Accident
Very recently, I was reading this story of an unfortunate event that happened to a father and his son. His 19-year-old son was driving the father’s car while on a date, and alcohol was involved.
The son was coming from a party where he and his friends had been drinking for hours. He had three of them in his father’s car, and was headed for a local club. A deer came out of nowhere and ran in front of the car.
As the son served to miss it, the car ran off the road across a 20-foot ditch and hit a tree head on. Everyone was injured badly, but the boy that was in the front passenger seat sustained head injuries that took his life.
Obviously, the parents sued the father and son, and won a $2.3 million dollar judgment. The fact that the boys had been drinking, and the father’s son was legally drunk, didn’t help the case any. The insurance covered the legal fees and one million dollars. Of course, that left $1.3 million to collect from the father, since he owned the car.
The parents both owned the car jointly, and therefore, became liable for the judgment along with the son. They lost everything they owned and sadly the father’s marriage failed with all the stress caused by the accident and lawsuit.
The problem is that the law treats the property owner as the guarantor of the safety of everyone that comes on the property. If anyone is injured on the property for any reason a frivolous lawsuit can be filed against you. This could be from a disgruntled tenant or anyone regardless of who’s fault it is. This is a big legal burden and it’s easy to see how lawsuits, frivolous or not, are easily generated in this type of legal system.
When a claim is awarded against you, an attorney can instantly seize all your assets, including your real estate, bank accounts, stock securities, by a few simple documents signed by the judge. Without any access to funds to pay your personal expenses and appeal the case, you are, as they say, dead in the water. Not a place that you want to be financially, when you are out of legal options.
I find it interesting that investors never realize they need asset protection, until it’s too late. Once, they are served with a lawsuit and found liable, then they cry out, why didn’t someone tell me about how to protect my assets, before this happened? The most important lesson I have learned about protecting assets is not using secret ninja techniques, but doing the basic stuff right and using what’s pragmatic in the real world.
Most small investors think to themselves, I don’t have enough assets for someone to sue me. How would you feel if you lost what few assets you do own? Wealth is relative. It is not only the rich and affluent who need asset protection. If you have any assets, regardless of the present value, they need protection.
It's what you own that determines vulnerability and lawsuits. If you have owned a house for any length of time, you have built up equity to temp a plaintiff’s lawsuit. Even the proverbial little old lady that needs help crossing the street, can get into big legal trouble.
For, instance, on one occasion an 83-year-old great grandmother accidentally hit the gas rather than the brake and slammed her Cadillac through a K-Mart storefront, seriously