Hey, guys. Toby Mathis is here. And today
we're going to talk about your stocks, your brokerage accounts
and how to hide them, make them disappear
so nobody can see them in a public record. You can keep them very private. In fact,
there are ways to even keep them away from ex-spouses, child support, alimony. There's actually ways to do that. I might hit on some of that today,
but I'll just show you guys how to make it go away from a public standpoint,
a public record standpoint, befor we do please for our algorithm
purposes like, subscribe, and as a reward, I'll share with you
a picture of one or more of my cats. All right, there you go. That's your reward. All right, let's dive into this. First, I've got to understand
how the concept works. What's actually a public record,
what's not? Before I even do that, I'm just going to say,
hey, if you are trying to engage in fraud or you're trying to hide
assets from a spouse in a mean way and other words, you're obligated to pay,
but you're not. Then I just please don't go any further. I don't want to be involved in fraud. Now, I'll just say that on the outset. Now, if you're somebody who's being unfairly targeted over and over
and over again, you're being harassed, or you're in a profession
where you just have a target on your back. For example, just went through the stats
with the American Medical Association with doctors. Doctors. It's just a general
practitioners, 8% a year risk of being sued, not just in a lawsuit
being sued for what you're doing if you are in something like neurosurgery,
it's over 19% a year of being targeted in a lawsuit. So let's not put a big bull's eye
by leaving all of our assets hanging out there. Let's make sure that we are
keeping them away from the public record. And so we're going to talk about
how that works. Number one, as an individual,
we do have certain protections. Like it's really difficult to find out how
much somebody has in their bank account. It's not like you can just Google it. It's not like
it's just going to pop up on a normal pie report. If you have somebody,
a private investigator, go in there and dig in
and start doing asset search. You might be able to tell somebody has a a an account at an institution
but rarely able to get balances legally. I should just say that. So there's already
a certain amount of protection. However, I shouldn't say
protection of that. You're not going to be able to find it. So you just it's not just hanging out there. So there is a degree of privacy
that already exists, but this is a big but if somebody comes after you,
it's going to be disclosed at some point if it's in your name. And the reason being
is because you it's just you. Anybody coming
after just you is going to have access to whatever you have in your name. And if that's a brokerage account,
say there's $1,000,000 in there, they got their already
into your brokerage account. You have zero effective protection. And so I'm going to explain it like this. I want you to visualize walking down
the street of a residential community, you know, pretend like it's Halloween
and the houses are all lit up and you're walking down the street,
you know, ignore the decorations. But you can see pretty much into anybody's
house, the houses, if they have lights on, it's
basically they're a fishbowl. So if the blinds are up and everything else, you can see
anything is going on inside that house. Now, imagine that right inside the window
there is a table. And on that table there are stacks of
dollar bills, like hundred dollar bills. It's just stacks upon stacks and the doors
open and there's nobody in there. Do you think that if maybe you left the door
open in your home and the lights on and there's people walking around
that somebody might be tempted to go in and help themselves
to your stacks of cash. Absolutely. You are. You're you're actually bringing it
upon yourself at that point. Now, I just used Halloween as an example,
so it didn't seem creepy that you're walking down a neighborhood
and looking into everybody's windows. But it could be any night of the week. Everything's visible, it's clear. And they can see your cash. That means they're in in lawsuit purposes. That means somebody
that has everything in their name. Hey, I can see
you have ten rental properties. I could see you on a business. I could see
you have these other things, right? I can see all your vehicles. Hey, you have a really nice Mercedes
and you have a nice Range Rover, okay? You are somebody
that is a great defendant, right? I know that there's a value to suing you
just because even if it's just a frivolous suit
and it's full of crud, you're going to pay something to make it go away
because you have lots of assets. It's the old adage, you know, the doctor
gets sued, the homeless guy doesn't. Nobody's going to sue the homeless guy because they're like,
I really don't want your what? I'm not going to get your shopping cart
full of belongings. They don't want anything
that somebody has. If I can see that you own things
that I want and I can make your life and be a nuisance in your life,
there's value in targeting you, which is what causes some of the lawsuits,
especially the frivolous suits you hear about people
being unfairly targeted. It's usually the wealthy,
rarely are the poor targeted in lawsuits. Right? It's just not something you're
not going to get anything out of it. So let's say, first off, that we we don't
we don't want to leave our stuff just sitting
where it's visible in the window. Right. We want to at least turn out the lights,
maybe drop those blinds so people can't see it. So that's defense number one. What's a better defense
if you have cash in your house? What do most people do with the cash
in their house to make it to where somebody can't just take it easily? And if you answered, put it in a safe. Yeah, that's a good one. Some people are going to put it in there. But the freezer. No, you're going to put it in your safe. And the reason you're putting in a safe. So that's not easy for somebody
just to come into your house. And if they're in their house,
that it's not easy for them to take it, that you're at least putting it
in a safe to try to protect it. But if I can see the safe, I can try to take the safe. That's called outside liability. If we have an entity. So a safe that might hold
a brokerage account, for example, you might have it in an LLC. Let's say that you're in California, and so you put your cash in an LLC
and then there's you. Yeah, there's me. So you get into a car accident or you caused some liability
or you're a professional. You're that neurosurgeon
who gets sued all the time and they say, I want your cash. And you say, But it's in an LLC, it's protected
well outside liability in California. I could actually take it
and they'll take your membership interest. So now you go from being happy person
to being very sad person, right? All of a sudden
they took your membership interest, which means they got your cash,
they took your safe. And so for my example, we have our cash
in our house, we put it in a safe, but they take your safe out of your house
and they steal it. I've actually seen that happen. I actually had it to me
have happened to me. My safe was empty, but
I had contractually free place my windows years ago and I still remember it like the
I had a little safe in the back of my closet
that was bolted into the closet. And I was like, Oh, it's just one of those little Home
Depot safes that you buy, right? I didn't think anything of it. I used it to store
a couple of documents here or there. But in this particular instance,
it was empty. There wasn't anything in there for them. But they stole the safe. Anyway, somebody came back in and got it. So I always think that maybe
it was contractors looking at your house or in there replacing windows and hey,
there's a safe in the back of the of a closet. Maybe it's worth something. So they came back in later to get it
somebody might take your safe. Actually happened to another neighbor
of mine actually down here in Las Vegas. Somebody busted his back window out
and ran in and grabbed his safe. It was a another one. It was something that was Carrier Bill
and that really messed him up like he was. I don't know what was in it,
but he was a mess for quite a while. Somebody could come in
and try to take your safe. Sometimes that that's enough of a target. They see your name on an LLC. Maybe there's something in there, right? So if you're dealing with Anderson,
you know, we advocate the security through obscurity. We like to keep your ownership of things
very private. We also like to use things like Wyoming's,
that Wyoming LLC is where somebody cannot take it. They cannot take your membership. The most they could get is
perhaps they lean against that property. Let's see if I could spell a lean against your property
so maybe they can get a lean against it. Congratulation that in and a quarter
I'll get you a cup of coffee. It's just
it's not going to get you anything because you're never going to issue
and you can give them the cash even if they were to win, even if you you were driving
and you hit a bus load and none. So we don't we don't hit the nuns. Right. But let's say you had will make you
an obvious medalist about that. We're not going to make you smiling
or sad. You have a liability. Maybe one of your kids gets into a car
accident and they get sued. So they can't take your entity away if it's put in Wyoming,
that's why we use it. Even more importantly,
your name is not on it, so they don't even know it exists. No name LLC. What that means is the LLC has a name,
but your name's not associated with it. Your name's not in a public record. I can't see that you own it
and you put your trading account in there in that LLC and nobody can see it. Nobody sees that you have the LLC. If somebody sues you what brokerage
accounts in your name, there aren't any. You have private interest in an LLC
and you might have to disclose that if you enter in a knockdown,
drag out lawsuit, you might be saying,
I own a private interest in an LLC. Okay, good. In another state that in anything
else you own some stock in or shares. And I mean, they're going
to be like a private company. We don't know what it's worth. You don't get to go dig into it
as a matter of course, just because you're in a lawsuit,
you don't get to say, well,
what does it do? And all this fun stuff. It's like, Sorry,
I just have private interests. This is what I have. I'm a member. They don't get to sue it for
for no reason. They might say, Well,
we want that membership interest. You can't have it. You know, under state statute, in that particular state, Wyoming,
the most you can get is land. So it makes the value go down
because they can't see what's in it. So if you deal with Anderson,
you know that we are big buffs on, again, security through obscurity, making it
so people can't see what you have. And then even if they can see
what you have, they can't take it. It puts you in the negotiating seat. And we've never had to go
to loggerheads on this ever. This is what's crazy. We have tens of thousands of clients
over 70,000 clients nationwide. And we've never for 25 years
never had to go to loggerheads on it because it solves the issue
with a $32 million lawsuit. Sometimes we talk about it. You've probably seen some videos on the client
when they were talking about their experience
settled for less than $2 million. They were dead to rights,
but it forced the issue so that they could get
a reasonable settlement. And when I say that they were dead
to rights, there was a whole bunch of investors. This was during the recession and everybody was going toes up
except our client had the deep pockets and they were able to negotiate
a very good settlement. You'll hear us often talking about
another one, which was an establishment. I want to see what kind of establishment
I want you to be able to research and figure it out. But there was a heinous accident. The insurance company was trying
would did deny coverage because it was a valet company
that caused the issue. And we had multiple parties involved in the ownership of the business and the entity that owned the real estate. In long story short, our client was able
to get out very inexpensively and expeditiously
to get out of the lawsuit. And meanwhile, they continued to go after other parties
where everything was in their name. Like they literally settled
not on the value of the case, but on the value of what they could extort
from somebody and get from somebody. There was a reasonable value to that
and they weren't going anywhere near it. It was just one of those situations
where they were just squeezing everybody to get every dollar that they could get. Our client got out early. The case was still going on
as of right now. It's still going on four years later. They're just going after people years
back, trying to get as much money out of these people, far in excess of what
the value of the case was worth. Just trying to squeeze
and squeeze and squeeze and threaten and threaten and threat. And we don't want
our clients involved in that. If you owe something,
by all means, pay it. Negotiate a reasonable amount. By all means, please do that. But we're not going to
have you involved in litigation simply because you have assets
and you have the deep pockets. And so that's what we want to avoid. And so that's what this type of thing
sets up and actually does. So we're going
to keep your name off of the entity. People aren't going to be able
to just Google you and see what you own, even if they get a private investigator,
they're not going to be able to see that you are on this is completely invisible
from a public record standpoint. So this is like again,
using my analogy of the cash in the house,
you at least put it in a safe. That's great. But what if we put the safe
in the middle of the desert and dug it in a hole
and nobody could even see it? They didn't even know it was there. That's even better when they don't know
what's there in. It's not in your house, it's
not in your state. They can't take it. And even if they did know it was there,
they still can't take it. The rules say, Hey, you can't go dig it up
and take it out of the desert. Sorry. What you can do,
though, is if they ever decide to go out into the desert
and get their cash and start distributing it,
then you could be standing in line. That's your win. But you're at the mercy
of that individual member. And, you know, chances
are they mean we've never actually had to have that scenario.
It doesn't play itself out that way. Lawsuits are about negotiating
and settling. And so 99.9% of them,
that's the route it's going to go. And that's what we want. We want to give you
the best bargaining position. Now let's go back to trading accounts. So some of you are looking at it
going LLC. I want my brokerage to have a problem
with that. In my experience,
having done this for 25 years, 80% of the time, no, it's just easy. The other 20% of the time. It's not that they object to putting in an LLC,
they do not object to putting it in LLC. In fact, most accounts
that are of size are held in LLC. If they're going to be
in some sort of entity, they're not just going to be
in an individual's name. There's going to be either a trust involved, an LLC involved,
or some sort of entity, whether it be an estate plan, an asset protection trust,
an LLC, a limited partnership. It's going to be something, right? What they worry about
is that they're going to designate you a professional and charge to in
and try to charge you for data. So here's what you can do in that case. What you do is you have a private account
that you open up that's in your name but doesn't have assets and you open up
the account through the LLC and it doesn't have immediate data,
like they have the live data feed and they want to charge you for it
because they think that you're some sort of broker.
That's one way around. It is you just have the individual
and then you can you can just go back and forth which, which account
for your executing a trade on. It's actually pretty simple or
if you just want to avoid the whole issue, what you do
is you open up your trading account in a personal property trust. This is no different than something like
a living trust, except it's being opened just to hold that account
and you make the beneficiary the LLC. That's an easy workaround. If you ever had that brokerage saying,
Hey, we want to charge you for the data, you going to say, Well,
I just want to open it up. And essentially a living trust is just a grant toward
trust is what its technical term is. So if you say is this a simple, complex
or grantor trust, you're going to open it up
as a grantor trust. They're used to that
because they open up living trust. Most people have their accounts
in a living trust. You should not be holding any substantial
assets in your name individually. It should always be held
in a living trust, if nothing else, so that if you pass,
you don't have to probate the cash. It's a silly right that you're just adding
an expense that need not be incurred. But if you put it in a personal property,
trust super easy. We've done this thousands of times now. Like literally we've done this structure thousands of times and you could just
assign the beneficial interest. Usually brokerage accounts don't care. You know, again, if you're doing
the online accounts, the TD Ameritrade or the Schwab's of the world, yet
80% of the time it's never an issue. 20%, they'll flag it and say,
hey, we think it might be a professional, in which case you just open it up
as the Personal Property Trust. We actually do them as a matter of course. If somebody is doing an LLC, we'll just say, Hey, contact
your brokerage, try to open the account. If you have an issue of open
the Personal Property Trust and again, you make the beneficial interest,
all the interest holder, even the guarantor as that LLC and voila,
this is ignored for tax purposes and it goes straight
to that trading account. Now I'm
just going to mention a couple of things. From a tax standpoint, you could set
this up to where it's ignored. You just don't get to write off
a bunch of business expenses associated with an investment account. You know, there's
this area of being a professional trader which there's videos on that as well
you can go look at. But for most people, 99.9% of the people, this thing might just be a disregarded
entity flowing in. You're not worried about expenses, you're
not worried about writing anything off. If you are and you have other business
interests, you have other real estate, for example,
you might make this into a partnership and have partial ownership
by a corporate general partner or manager that's acting there as usually 10 to 20%. And that money flows and you can write off all your expenses to the corporation and everything else
just flows through to your individual. If I lost you on that,
let's just say we get tax benefits. If we want to. Most people,
they don't care. It's not going to make a difference. They don't have substantial expenses
associated with their trading. They're just owning an investment account. You could set this up
so there's no tax return on it. It just flows right on to your return. We don't care,
but we're keeping it as a public record. It's not available.
As, you know, tax returns. You can't just ask for somebody's
tax return and see it. They're still trying to get Trumps. Other than a few leaks,
you wouldn't even know what somebody's taxes are, right? So that's not something somebody can just
search and find out your tax return. So if it did, they would see it
on a Schedule D, just as, hey, there's some dividend income, maybe some maybe there's some capital gains income. There's some different things
that might pop up on your schedules attached to your 1040,
but it keeps it out of the public record. People won't be able to see it
in the event that there's a lawsuit. So it's still a very,
very effective asset protection tool to set it up that way,
even if you ignore it for tax purposes. Now, time out. There is a heightened level
that you could do. If you have millions of dollars,
you may want to layer in. In Nevada, asset protection trusts. I mentioned earlier about alimony
and child support. There's only one state
where protects you against all creditors. It's called a credit shelter
trust under our statute in Nevada, they cannot get into those assets
as a block or trustee. Usually that somebody like myself
or somebody here that's a resident of Nevada
or a bank in Nevada that's serving as the block or trustee,
you could still be handling the investments, but keeps it from being accessible to other parties, period. It's like it's it's
the bazooka to the gunfight. Most people don't need that layer. But if you are somebody who is a high net
worth, you've been harassed or every year your ex decides to drag you into court
and try to extort more assets out of you. I say story, but tries to get more assets
out of you saying, hey, there's, you know, I'm owed more, I'm owed more
and you just don't want to deal with it. Then this might be a situation
where you layer in on Nevada Asset Protection Trust onto it
just so it's no longer yours. So you're just a beneficiary of a trust. You have a block or trustee. You can even have a separate party
being the investment trustee. And you just say, you know what, I'm just locking that money away
so nobody can can get back to me. You're a permissible beneficiary under it. If you're a lawyer,
then this would be a hybrid trust. If you're not a lawyer,
then don't worry about it. We draft them to where you could
still get to the money if you needed. But there's
always going to be a third party there as your as your blocker,
so that third parties can't just go in there and say,
give me the money. They would say no. And they're not. They cannot be compelled under the trust. There's either a 0 to 2 year
waiting period on when when the full asset
protection kicks in. If it's somebody who's a known creditor
and you already have the liability, it's two years. If you don't, then it's zero days. Like you could set this up. If you don't have an issue
and it would protect you. So if you're a substantial net worth
some person, maybe 10 million above, I'd be looking at that asset protection
trust anyway, if you're below that point and maybe you're just being annoyed
constantly, you just say, I just want it to go away. Then that might be a workaround, but they do have two years
to go inside that trust. If they're a known creditor. So there you go. That's how you hide your
your your brokerage account. That's how you keep it
to where people can't see it. That's how you make it. So even if they can see it,
they can't take it again. Using my analogy,
if somebody is walking down the street, you're cash isn't even in your house. There's no reason for them to break into your house
because they can't see the cash. There's no safe in the house. There's nothing for them to get. We buried it in the desert. Your name's not on it.
They don't know it's there. They have zero idea
that you have those assets, which is a great situation to be in because you never want
to create a bullseye on your back just because you're wealthy
and just because people can see it. So we want to make sure that bull's eye
isn't on your back and that if you do have a liability,
you're able to negotiate it quickly and settle
without the drama and emotional stress and cost of going through years
of litigation and this type of planning has a definite effect on your ability to settle things quickly
and get out of things for the least amount humanly possible
and allow you to get on with your life. Hey, if you like this type of information,
please share it with others. Please leave us your comments. I do read them
and we do look for additional ideas. Feel free to share your ideas and your thoughts down below in the comment section.
