Asset Protection for the Little Guy

ASSET PROTECTION!!! at a price anyone can afford   

Asset Protection for the “Not So Rich” and the Modest Estate
(Financial Calamity does not just happen to the rich)               
A modern idea and need for a modern and perilous time.

WHY PAY A LAWYER? can develop a plan to protect your assets from liability suits, privacy invasions, death taxes, probate battles and the insidious legal delay in probate.  ASSET PROTECTION is a modern idea for today’s world.  Everybody needs to protect what he or she has worked for.  Asset Protection is needed for the “Not So Rich”, the modest estate, and generally for peace of mind.  No rich person worked harder than you did for what you have.  Protect it.  Financial Calamity does not just befall the rich.

Unfortunately, a lot of mystique has been placed around Asset Protection by attorneys, seminar leaders, lecturers on the topic,  estate planners, financial professionals, pseudo experts, and authors in the field. 

One cannot read a financial sections of newspaper or magazines, or go to an estate planning seminar, and not hear the “parade of horribles” about the need to protect one’s assets.  The bad news is the cost of this protection.  Sometimes it reminds of the adage that the cure is worse than the disease!

Well, there is economic Asset Protection for the little guy.  ASSET PROTECTION IS NOT EXPENSIVE.    And it is essential.  Just one lawsuit, death or injury of a wage-earning family member, or a catastrophic injury or illness, can destroy a lifetime of wealth and asset accumulation that you need for education or retirement.   You do not have to be a billionaire to catch a debilitating illness or be in an accident which outstrips your insurance.    Between their house and say, small stock portfolio or that 2 acres in the mountains, many people can approach $1,000,000 in assets.  Given recent bankruptcy code changes, these assets are at risk even more since the large homestead exemptions and other legal debt avoidance techniques whilst saving the asset are now just memories.

That’s why you need WHY PAY A LAWYER?  Our mission is to “help people to help themselves.”  Once you understand the basics of the plan--and once we understand your specific needs to formulate a plan for you--a safe harbor for your assets can be developed and implement-ed.

WHY PAY A LAWYER? has developed ASSET PROTECTION FOR THE LITTLE GUY.   Our principal Asset protection plan, and the average one that fits the needs of most people costs less that $1,299 complete.

There are many Asset Protection plans that involve expensive off-shore bank accounts and untested tax shelters, etc.   These programs have one thing in common–they cost a lot and take a lot of lawyers and accounts.  One can spend over $10,000 for such a plan, and thousands more to keep it current.   With that kind of a fee, there will be no assets to protect!

The WHY PAY A LAWYER?   ASSET PROTECTION FOR THE LITTLE GUY plan  gives you asset protection right here in the USA.  Nothing is off-shore.  Accounting consultation is minimal if needed at all (depends on the assets).   No lawyers needed since the program has already been court tested, and it was developed by a lawyer.  We will include his description of the plan if you want it.  (We do not mind taking to your lawyer, of course, if you want us to do so; he is going to love the program.)

Your minimal fee covers wills, living wills, medical powers of attorney, financial powers of attorney, medical powers of attorney, an irrevocable trust, and trust management organization (which you control–this organization is the key to the entire plan), and all the help and conferencing you need to understand and exploit the plan.  All that for less than $1,299.  While there may be some other expenses that you need to incur, that is not the normal case, and most importantly, we do not need to know your account numbers.  We do not, as many of the Asset Protection seminars tout, want to manage you assets for a fee.   (Frankly, that is all that many of them want to do–get their hands in your till for a periodic fee.)

    More- - - -
            What is Asset Protection?
            Why you need it.
                --the adventures of Rudy and Derwood

What is Asset Protection?

Asset Protection is the arrangement of your estate and property in a form so as to immunize them from the reach of creditors, assure the ability of your assets to support you and yours, minimize taxation on the assets and when you die, and to pass on the estate to you intended. 

Usually this involves only a rearrangement in how assets are held, to titled, and taking advantage of time honored principles of ownership in the general and statutory law of the state where you live and, at times, the laws of other states which are available to you.

WHY DO YOU NEED IT?  HOW LIKELY IS IT THAT YOU WILL BE SUED FOR A JILLION DOLLARS?

Every book or seminar on the subject of Asset Protection starts will the “parade of horribles”--anecdotes on a financial calamity someone experienced.   These things do not just happen to the rich and superrich.   You need only your imagination to foresee what can happen.  One story will suffice.  A neighbor of a principal in WHY PAY A LAWYER? decided in 1985 to bid on 4-plex apartment unit advertised in the newspaper by the government for sale following it being taken by the government in foreclosure.  He was a 8-5 working man with a family (Derwood) .  He owned his house (with the bank--there was still a mortgage on it), and asked his friend Rudy, a person with a gift for home fix-up to join him.  50-50 partnership deal.  They won the bid, prospered in the landlord business, then bought a second 4-plex, one, a third one, and things went swimmingly.  By the early 1990's, they held about a dozen 3 and 4 plexes, some of them with considerable equity. 

The two had foresight which proved fortuitous.  At their request, WHY PAY A LAW-YER? had set up a separate corporation or limited liability company to hold title to each building.  In that way, any problems that might arise in one building could not contaminate another.  All of these entities had the property managed by yet another entity, the managing company, so that all rent, bills, etc., were handed in one account.  This meant that each building’s owning corporation or limited liability company served as a sort of fire wall to save catastrophe in one from afflicting a sister building or the overall owing and managing entity.

On January 15, 1992, within a month of buying a 3 plex in a rundown neighborhood in Phoenix, Arizona, a 19 year old mother with two infants was murdered in her apartment.  Her parents came down--understandably--like avenging angels and sued the corporation holding title to the building for $6,000,000.  Their claim was that the door lock was broken and that they and their now deceased daughter had told Rudy about it.  Rudy took umbrage at this and vigorously denied any knowledge of any such need of repair.  On top of this, the police suspected that the whole thing arose from a drug deal gone bad.  What a mess!

This whole thing  was a personal affront to his pride in his workmanship.  Calm down, said Derwood.  We have protected our assets through WHY PAY A LAWYER?  Did you buy the last beer or did I?

The available insurance on the building was $100,000.  (Why have more--the building only cost $48,000.)  Derwood and Rudy took the one corporation with the title to the building to the bankruptcy court and submitted a plan of reorganization.  They told the bankruptcy court that the debtor--the corporation--had two assets, a building and an insurance policy.   They told the bankruptcy court that the debtor--the corporation--had four debts, a mortgage, a water bill, an electric bill, and a gargantuan tort claim.  They proposed to keep the building, the electric bill and the water bill.  They proposed to give the policy limit to the parents and the deceased’s estate. That balance of the claim, over the $100,000 would be kissed off in the bankruptcy court’s order confirming this plan, which plan the court agreed upon and signed.  (The lawsuit claimant, under the law, really had no other say in the matter, since this disposition of the claim is what the bankruptcy law allows.)

Footnote One.  WHY PAY A LAWYER? helped hold down the legal costs of the bankruptcy.  Derwood and Rudy did a lot of their own legal work.  WHY PAY A LAWYER? recommended, as it often does, an economical attorney.

Footnote Two.   Derwood and Rudy, more correctly, the owning corporation on the building, sold it in 2001 for three times what the building was purchased for!

Footnote Three. The police caught the killer.  It was the deceased’s cousin and four other friends, it was a drug deal misunderstanding, and the killer, when asked about getting in, said “Naw, the door was standing open.”  Too bad for State Farm insurance.

Well, this came out well, thanks to Asset Protection in structuring the ownership of the property “empire”, as Rudy references it.  But the adventures of Derwood and Rudy bespoke of another need, and Asset Protection helped here as well.  Over the years, these stalwarts had acquired sundry spouses and children.  To preserve peace in the family, i.e., stop potential feuding between children and extended family over the empire when they pass to the great apartment project in the sky, they used a combination of trusts, wills and corporations to develop an equitable distribution of all to all of concern to them.