Saturday, December 7, 2013

Asset Protection Planning Strategies To Help Investors Safeguard Their Assets

By Tiffany Gill


As you continue accumulating wealth, you need to take measures to protect it. You can do this through asset protection planning which involves using various strategies to reduce the risk of losing your assets or paying too much tax. Asset protection can help you make it difficult or very costly for a person who has sued you to reach your assets.

If the attorney who is representing a plaintiff finds out that collecting against the assets of the defendant is difficult, he or she can choose to drop the charges or settle on terms favorable to the defendant. Well structured wealth protection plan do not attempt to hide assets. Instead, they use structures such as limited liability companies and trusts to safeguard the investments of an individual in an ethical, legal and effective way.

If you implement a good plan to shield your assets, you can rest assured that your wealth will always be safe even if someone files a lawsuit against you. It is essential for you to plan early and be objective about the goals you want to achieve with such a plan. One way to shield your assets is increasing the limits of your liability insurance policies. Ideally, you should make sure that your umbrella liability coverage is of an amount that is equal to your total net worth.

It is also important to protect yourself from tenants. If you own a number of rental properties, consider creating a business entity like a limited liability company or corporation in order to shield your other assets from disgruntled renters. In this way, if a tenant sues you for any amount, he or she can attack the assets in the entity which holds the real estate but the other wealth you own will be safe.

It is also essential that you review the joint accounts you have. If you have money in joint accounts with your business partners, children, roommates or elderly parents, you can lose it if the joint account holder is sued or gets divorced. As a precaution, make sure that you do not place a large amount of money into a jointly held account.

People who own partnerships should make sure that they formalize their businesses. It is risky to operate informal business partnerships since the actions of one partner affect the other partner. If one of them is sued, the assets of the other partner can be jeopardized. Investors should either avoid establishing partnerships or formalize them. They can also opt to form entities such as corporations and limited liability companies to keep their assets safe.

You can also safeguard your investments from creditors by placing them into an asset protection trust. This involves transferring a part of your investments into a trust that is operated by an independent trustee. Such a trust can enable you to protect even the investments owned by your children.

Some asset protection planning strategies are simple to implement. For example, an investor can choose to transfer his or her assets to the name of his or her spouse. Another option is to invest more money into employer sponsored retirement plans in order to gain from unlimited protection. Keeping business investments separate from personal investors is the other simple way to safeguard assets.




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