Asset Protection Zone

Asset Protection

If you have assets you want to protect from the taxman, unscrupulous businesses or even the prying eyes of people who should keep their eyes to themselves then you need asset protection.

Asset protection is about protecting the value of your assets. It can be accomplished easily using just a few simple methods.

First, if you are trying protect anything then you need to keep it out of sight. Out of sight, out of of mind is a phrase I am sure you’ve heard of.

How can you put a physical asset out of sight? You put the true ownership out of sight. For example, your home. It’s yours, but what if you were paying rent on it, could someone take it? No way. Imagine if someone visited the county assessor’s office and the ownership was a company or trust, then you have laid a layer of protection over your asset from prying eyes. That’s what asset protection is all about.

You can have multiple types and layers of asset protection depending on your needs and who you are protecting your assets from. The simple type described above can done as simply as forming a corporation or LLC in your home state and transferring your assets into the name of the corporation.

You have very simple asset protection, but you gain very little in true anonymity since someone can contact the state and find you who is the owner of the corporation.  You also gain very little in the way of tax protection since the assets are taxable on the corporate level.

For true anonymity and true asset protection, you need to look at offshore corporations and trusts. If you incorporate in an offshore jurisdiction then the corporate ownership is completely secret.

No one can find out who is the owner of the offshore corporation. You gain tax advantages since the offshore corporation is only taxed based on income earned in the US. Since the assets are owned by a foreign offshore corporation, if someone is seeking legal redress against you then your assets are completely protected. No one can prove that you own the assets because you don’t, your company does.

If you want to true asset protection, you can have it. Just be sure you get the level of asset protection you need to protect what you have.