Asset Protection: Concepts and Strategies for Protecting Your Wealth Hardcover - 2004 - 1st Edition

A practitioner's guide to today's most effective asset protection strategies

Shielding assets isn't easy to do in our increasingly litigious society. Yet all too often, business owners and high-net-worth individuals find it more difficult to protect their financial interests from unregulated "asset protection planners" than from the courts--and find themselves losing heavily to both.

Asset Protection details today's most successful, legitimate, and court-proven strategies for protecting one's assets. Taking a unique, all-encompassing approach that minimizes complex legalese to focus on easy-to-understand, effective asset-shielding practices and techniques, this timely book discusses:

• The goals of asset protection, along with steps for implementing an effective asset protection program
• Traditional as well as new techniques--what they are, how they work, when and how to use them
• The vital relationship between asset protection and financial planning, and how to design one umbrella program to address both

Asset Protection delivers a welcome dose of common sense and legitimacy to a field top-heavy with gimmickry and dishonesty. Written by two of today's top legal asset protection experts, it provides you with frank, pull-no-punches details on how to do everything under the law to shield assets from harm in an unpredictable and financially perilous world.

For professionals, business owners, and high net worth individuals, the danger in leaving assets vulnerable to the whims of courts and claimants is higher today than at any time in the past. And while seminar speakers often refer to "bulletproof" asset protection strategies, experienced asset protection planners know that no program or method exists that is effective in every situation--because as soon as a strategy is proven effective the attempts to undermine it will begin in earnest.

Asset Protection is today's most level-headed and technique-based look at how asset protection planning should be approached, both by the finance practitioner and the individual. It presents tools that have worked while warning against means that are inappropriate or even perilous, and provides guidelines for developing effective strategies that will work in both macro (broad) and micro (specific) situations.

Written by two of today's most experienced and authoritative asset protection attorneys, this results-driven book provides a detailed, objective look at all vital aspects of the asset protection picture:

• Trusts--What they are, what they aren't, which to implement, and when
• Bankruptcy law --Including pre-bankruptcy planning tactics
• Fraudulent transfers--And the confusion underlying the Uniform Fraudulent Transfers Act (UFTA)
• Offshore planning--How to make it financially effective, tax-compliant, and judicious
• Asset exemption options--And the limits of exempt asset status

In addition, Asset Protection also goes beyond other books of its type to explore the issue of morality in asset protection, and how actions that are seemingly right under the law can still lead to defeat in the courtroom. It provides different scenarios to illustrate how moral dilemmas can impact judges and juries, and discusses how to address these situations--or, better yet, keep them from ever reaching the courtroom.

The future of asset protection is being written even as you read these words. Get the inside story on strategies for shielding assets both today and in the future, from everything from lawsuits and the IRS to creditors and even outright scams, in the comprehensive and indispensable Asset Protection.