Protecting Valuable Personal and Business Assets
Your assets are the result of hard work and dedication throughout your life. They’re a representation of not only who you are but who you’ve been and who you want to be. Your hard work deserves equal effort to protect and secure what you’ve earned for today, tomorrow, and after you’re gone.
Our team can help you form an asset protection strategy whether you need to protect your assets from Uncle Sam, your family, personal or business litigation, or anyone else looking to prey on your hard work. Business assets, bank accounts, retirement accounts, real property, digital assets, and other valued assets need to be safe and secure. We will thoroughly review your circumstances to determine which options may best protect you.
An estate plan, specifically a trust such as a Revocable Living Trust (RLT) or Irrevocable Trust, can be a great foundation to build your asset protection plan around. These trusts can protect you and your family from the court and government upon your death or incapacity. RLTs will provide you with the flexibility to make adjustments to your plan throughout your life while Irrevocable Trusts provide less flexibility but allow you to exclude certain assets from financial consideration by important government programs.
Domestic Asset Protection Trusts
A Domestic Asset Protection Trust (DAPT) can provide an extra layer of protection when plaintiffs attempt to hold you, personally or as a business owner, responsible for a lawsuit. Domestic Asset Protection Trusts provide advantageous asset protection and privacy in Wyoming, Nevada, Utah, Alaska, Hawaii, and twelve other states. It’s important to work with an attorney to form these as California courts may refuse to acknowledge DAPTs held in other states.
Exempt Asset Planning
Your plan should take into account all potential exemptions that protect assets from claims or seizure by creditors. There’s a lot of red tape surrounding the definitions of these exemptions, so we can help you understand how these exemptions work and how you can take advantage of them. Assets include assets governed by the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA), a portion of your life insurance, tools of the trade, and more.
Tax-Exempt Planning
Optimizing your plan to get the most out of your taxes is another important aspect of asset protection planning. You should be maximizing tax exemptions to get the most out of your money. For instance, the Homestead Exemption in California allows you to exempt an amount of the equity in your home calculated through the California Consumer Price Index. This type of planning will also help you avoid claims by creditors should you need to file for bankruptcy in the future.
Legal Entity Optimization
A move to hold your business assets under various different or layered corporations, LLCs, or other legal structures ensures the overall risk is dispersed among those entities, reducing the overall liability to your business ventures. This includes putting assets under the oversight of a Limited Partnership (LP), Limited Liability Company (LLC), corporation, or other legal entity or entities. Failure to properly plan with this strategy can result in you and your business paying more in taxes though, so care must be taken in the execution of these strategies. On the other handle, this strategy can provide important tax benefits on top of spreading or limiting liability if done correctly.
Private Retirement Plan
This can be a valuable tool available only to California residents. These plans take advantage of the retirement exemption under the California Code of Civil Procedure § 704.115. This exemption excludes any assets “established or maintained by private employers” from tax levies as long as the account is held primarily for retirement purposes.
These are some of the many asset protection strategies we can help you implement. You’ve worked your whole life to get where you are. Don’t let it all fall apart because of a lack of planning or a bad plan. At the Dahl Law Group, we have the expertise and experience to put a plan in place to protect even the most sensitive business assets. Contact us and let us secure your hard work.
