Protecting Your Legacy
You have worked your entire lifetime to accumulate your wealth. Now that might be $100,000 or $100,000,000. Regardless of your net worth, it undoubtedly wasn’t easy to achieve. And yet it’s all too easy to lose everything if you don’t take the proper steps to protect yourself.
Despite the late-night TV scams touting “Asset Protection,” there are legitimate planning opportunities that will help you keep more of what you have earned in the event a frivolous lawsuit or other casualty threatens to wipe out your years of savings.
How Epiphany Law Can Help
Epiphany Law can help you decipher the scams from the real planning opportunities. Some of the legitimate planning opportunities we can help you with are moving funds to exempt assets, asset segregation, charging order protection and the use of trusts.
Whether you agree or disagree with the policy decisions that the government has made with regard to legitimately protecting your assets, you would be a fool to not take advantage of the opportunities provided. Epiphany Law can help you maximize your protection, ensuring that your legacy will be protected throughout your life and for generations to come.
Questions & Answers
Q: What are “exempt” assets?
A: Exempt assets are those assets that the government simply exempts from creditor execution. That means there are certain things that can’t be taken away from you -- ever. These include arcane items, such as burial plots and cooking stoves, to the more relevant exemptions such as your homestead, life insurance or annuity contracts, and retirement benefits. Each of these has dollar amount limits and/or rules, but the point is that you want to own more exempt assets.
Q: What is a charging order and how does it protect my assets?
A: If you own assets within an LLC, in general, your personal creditors can’t attach the assets within the LLC. Thus, if a personal injury attorney sued you for everything you had, the creditor would likely not be able to get at the assets within your LLC. Rather, all that creditor gets is a “charging order” which only allows the creditor to receive assets that are distributed. So guess how many assets you’ll want to distribute if a creditor has a charging order? Yep – Zilch.
Q: What do you mean by “Asset Segregation?”
A: You generally don’t want all of your assets owned just by you or just by your business. Remember, whatever is owned by one individual/business is at risk for any lawsuit against that individual/business. Rather, put valuable assets in a different entity. For example, your operating business should not own the company’s real estate. If your equipment or patents are valuable, put those in a separate entity.
