- Hey guys, Toby Mathis here. I'm one of the founders of Anderson and if you're on my YouTube channel, hopefully you're subscribed. If you're not, you should be. And I want to talk about asset protection for real estate investors and I'm just going to have a
conversation with you about it. 'Cause a couple of
occurrences have had happened in the last couple months with clients that I want to share with you. And they really illustrate the point. Like right now, it's really
important that you own nothing but control things. What we've seen repeatedly
is folks being attacked because they own property. And if they come to us after that attack is actually
going on, it's too late. There's not a lot you can do 'cause we voidable transaction rules and fraudulent conveyance rules that prevent you from taking an asset away from a known creditor. What's really important
is to set these things up at the inception of your investing. And I get this question, I just actually literally
just had this conversation of somebody who says, but
I don't have any equity in my house. I'm not worried about it. I have a mortgage. And I said, that's great. You have a property with a mortgage. A creditor does not care that there's a mortgage on the property. They're going to go after you. If you own that property in your name, that is a link directly
into your personal world, including garnishing your
personal accounts and your wages and things that you own
going after any sort of your investments or any of your other
assets, including your home. Depends on your state as to how much of a homestead you have. But if you're outside of Texas or Florida, you're going
to have limitations. And so it's not about the asset itself when you're investing in real estate. A lot of times, it's the
liability that we want to isolate. So we want to block that property off and we teach you how to do that in our tax and asset protection workshop
by using trust and LLCs. In fact, I really urge
you to click the link to the Tax and Asset Protection Workshop. It's absolutely free. We teach them about once a
week and you can go in there and you can learn all the ins
and outs of how these work. Now going back to what
I was saying is you want to own nothing but control everything. You want to have a living
trust for your estate plan. You want to have limited
liability entities for your risk assets and anonymity. You want to have anonymous
ownership of LLCs for your safe assets like
your brokerage account and things like that. You want to remove it from
your personal realm so that somebody cannot reach it. And let me give you a prime example. So I had a client in California get sued and she was with a bunch
of other defendants of somebody who was
trying to shake them down. And what's the first thing
they did is they started doing asset searches and they
started asking questions of her attorney. It looks like she doesn't have any assets and they're trying to get confirmation or somebody to say, "No, no, no. Of course she has a bunch of stuff." They dismissed her boom, not even a dollar out of her pocket, they just said, "You're released." 'cause they did not want
to have empty pockets in that case. The punchline, she owned nothing, but she controlled much. That was a prime example.
I'll give you another one. So I have a client that
owns large multifamily and manages large multi-family
apartment buildings. So a client or one of the tenants there
had an invitee come in and step on a rusty nail. We all know this is a bunch
of bogus stuff, right? But the insurance company steps in 'cause you, she had a
policy on the property. The management company gets sued. The insurance company was
just like, "Hey, well, of course, we'll just
go ahead and settle." They got out of it, which is great. She's going to walk away,
nothing out of pocket. But that left the management company. There's always going to be a
management company in fact's. You as the management company,
you're going to end up having to pay both of those sides. Well, here's the the problem. The insurance policy was
pretty much exhausted. They literally gave this
guy close to seven figures. So the insurance company
was like, "Now we're out. You're on your own."
Thank God. We had set it up where she had the management company separate, and this is the beautiful part. We were able do a walkaway. We sent her to a bankruptcy
attorney who said, "I don't even need to bankrupt it." The liability is in
the management company. There's nothing in that
management company. The way we set things up
at Anderson is we like to use different LLCs and
isolate that liability. It worked to a T in this particular case, a very negative situation that could have gotten
way out of hand was able to be nipped in the bud simply because of the way she was structured. Now, if you're interested
in keeping your affairs out of the public record, if you're
interested in making sure that you have a strong
asset protection plan, where we're minimizing your risk assets and protecting your assets
from those risk assets, and even more importantly
from you, because believe it or not, when we're driving
down that road, there's no way to protect you from you. Your liability is your liability. If you hit a car and you cause an accident or one of your kids, God
forbid, causes serious injury to somebody else driving
a car, you're responsible. And we need to make sure that
you don't have a whole bunch of assets in your name that
somebody can take garnish and use to pay off some big lawsuit that they just puffery up. Because God knows that some
of these juries are just, it's like lottery winners right now. It's some of it's crazy what's
going on in these courtrooms. And you do not want to
be in that situation where you're sitting there
saying, "I'm actually a really good person. I'm not a mean greedy landlord, or I'm not a mean greedy employer who is now you're being
accused of all sorts of discrimination against your employees or you're being accused of
for an independent contractor that they really should
have been an employee and you misclassified 'em and you now owe a whole
bunch of money to the state and to the feds and to that employee." You don't want to be sitting
there in front of a jury of your peers when you
realize, wait a second, their perception is that anybody
who has a business, anybody who has real estate is rich and you owe somebody else that money. You don't want to be in that situation. You want to avoid that situation. And how do we avoid it? By making sure nobody targets
you in the first place. I have a very good friend
who owns an insurance agency and she said something
that was really critical to me at one point, she goes, "If you're ever in a car accident, don't say you're an attorney." And then she started telling
me all the stories about all of her doctor clients that
would get into a car accident and they immediately say,
"Don't worry, I'm a doctor. And then she said, Oh my gosh, you may as well just write the
lawsuit at that point." Because immediately they
think they have a deep pocket. You do not want to be perceived
as having a deep pocket. You want to keep your affairs private. Now, a lot of you guys are
saying, "Well wait a second, there's the Corporate Transparency Act. I know you have to disclose
beneficial ownership. What about all that?"
Well, what about it? That's a non-public database
similar to your tax return. Somebody can't just go
look up your tax return. They can't go look up
Fincen and see that report. Even if it survives
constitutional scrutiny, which as of right now is up to be seen. Like I think, it's very ripe to be struck down in its entirety, but it's not something
that's a public record. What's a public record is
things that are in the states, things that are on titles
of those properties. And again, at our Tax and Asset Protection Workshop, we go into a deep dive
into these strategies so you can learn exactly how they work. So by all means, it's free.
Click on that link. Or if you'd like a strategy session where somebody will actually
put together a blueprint for you as to what a proper asset
protection plan looks like. You can absolutely do so.
We've been doing this for over 25 years. We've been doing this with great success. Our clients don't get sued,
very seldomly get audited. It's way below the what's typical. And that is because of the
way that we structure them, the way that we do tax mitigation. And our clients don't find
their estates wrapped up for years in the estate
courts and probate courts because of the way we
set it up, "Own nothing, control everything."
