Protect Your Home

Protecting the personal residence/marital home

What is one of your largest assets?

Your home? Yes.

Most clients have as one of their biggest asset their home.

What’s your home worth?

$300,000; $500,000; $1,000,000+?

Is that worth asset protecting? Absolutely.

The most difficult asset to protect is your personal residence. If you surf the Internet, you’ll find very little information about protecting your home due to the fact that there are few viable ways to protect the home.

Why is your personal residence at risk?

It depends on the state you are in, but as a general rule, in most states the interest in your home is subject not only to your creditors but that of your spouse.

If you or your spouse are a professional (doctors, lawyers, accountants/CPAs, insurance agents, financial planners, mortgage brokers, real estate agents, architects, etc.) then you have the added problem of having “professional” liability which puts all of your assets at risk every time you go to work (including the home). If you own a non-professional company, the work done, as a general statement, does not put your personal assets at risk.

How else could your home be at risk? 

As a homeowner, you typically will throw a few parties each year for your friends. If you serve alcohol at those parties and one of your guests leaves the party after drinking too much and gets into a car accident and kills three passengers in the other car (or turn them into quadriplegics), guess who is going to get sued for negligence? The homeowner. Most people think that an umbrella liability policy of 1 million dollars will protect them; but, if you can be linked to a death or serious injury through your negligence, your 1-million-dollar umbrella is not going to go very far. After your insurance pays 1 million of the 3–million-dollar verdict, the attorney for the plaintiff is going to go after all of your personal assets.

Teenage Children – If you have teenage children, chances are, at some point, you will go out of town and your children, whom you left home (the 16-19 year olds), will have a party or have friends over. Since the statistics say that over 50% of teenagers drink on a regular basis (many times binge drinking), the chances are high that there will be alcohol at the party at your house. If your children are the ones who procured the alcohol (and maybe even if they did not) and the attendees at the party get drunk and then drive around and get hurt or hurt others, guess who is going to be sued? The parents. Again, the 1-million-dollar umbrella policy from your homeowner’s policy is not going to go very far to protect you.

There are plenty of other reasons to asset protect your personal residence.

If you surf this site and others you might come to the conclusion that using and LLC or FLP is the right tool to protect the personal residence.

The main way to protect your personal residence is through a “debt shield.” Debt shields (also known as equity stripping or equity harvesting) not only asset protects your personal residence, but it can also work out as a terrific way to build a tax favorable retirement nest egg.

Instead of going into chapter an verse in this section about how to asset protect the personal residence, we have provided you a link where you can purchase and download a nine (9) page summary on how to protect your personal residence. Visit Asset Protection Products or go directly to purchase our Protecting Your Home Summary.