Asset protection is the art of indirect (or beneficial) ownership, and its goal is to enable you to achieve the following objectives lawfully and ethically:
- To place your assets beyond the reach of our legal system
- To place your assets beyond the reach of creditors
- To walk away from a catastrophic lawsuit with your assets intact
“Asset protection is the art of indirect, beneficial ownership.”
– Stephen Speiser
At its most basic, asset protection is a legal fortress behind whose battlements and layered defenses one can fully protect, defend, and shield their hard-earned wealth from the covetous eyes and predacious attacks of those who would seize it if given the opportunity: plaintiff’s attorneys, judgment creditors, government regulators, disgruntled business associates, future ex-spouses, reckless children and misguided heirs.
Simply put, courts and creditors can’t take from you that which you don’t own!
One useful way to visualize asset protection is to think of it as a “legal vault” into which one deposits their business and personal assets for safekeeping. It functions in much the same way as a bank vault. A bank vault protects one’s wealth (stocks, bonds, cash, deeds, jewelry, art, etc.) with layered defenses: a secure building, cameras, armed guards, sophisticated surveillance systems, alarms, massive bank vault doors, timed locks, etc.
Asset protection is the legal equivalent. It shields one’s wealth with layers of carefully constructed legal firewalls. Assets are placed in protective entities, that can be owned by protective holding companies, that can be owned by foreign entities, that can be owned by trusts. The more layers, the more entities used, the more shields deployed, the more difficult it will be for an adversary to get at your wealth and the more likely it is that they will give up and walk away empty handed.