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Stupid lawsuits have made an appearance in pop culture! We were excited to watch Curb last night and see Larry suffering from the threat of a frivolous lawsuit.

Setting up an asset protection trust involves a couple of steps. The first is creating the trust itself. That takes on average 2-3 weeks. Clients in a rush have created their trust within 3 days. The next step is “funding” the trust. That means putting your assets inside of the trust. How long this takes will depend on the number and type of assets you have. If you decide to open any offshore accounts, please budget 2 months for the bank to finalize everything.

While visiting a Cook Islands trustee office, I demonstrated to their team how I could easily look up US real estate ownership information online. They were blown away that our personal information is listed online for anyone to see. Why should someone have a right to know what home you own and where you live?

We speak with many people who want to remove their names from their real estate holdings for increased privacy and asset protection. It’s not hard to do. The catch is that for real estate you already own in your name, you can’t erase the record of ownership. There will still be a trace of when you owned the property. For true privacy in real estate, it works best if you never take ownership in your personal name.

Like any effective asset protection plan, you must plan early if you want to protect your assets from a personal guarantee. 

We sometimes talk to people who have signed a personal guarantee for a loan and when it looks like they will default on the loan, they only then investigate how they can protect their assets. 

What happens when you work hard to build your dream life for you and your family, and you start to worry that some evening, someone will show up on your porch. They ask, “is your name…?”  And when you say yes, they shove a pile of papers in your hands: “you’ve been served” they exclaim. 

Concerned about protecting your assets from bogus lawsuits, you look into doing some real asset protection planning. Along the way you learn that in order to have an effective plan, you have to rely on an independent party to help you. This is typically a trustee who would manage your trust.