Asset protection is a huge area of discussion. I am only going to provide some nuggets. IF you need more, you need to Google or you can sign up for an ELI Support Call with me and I can speak more freely.
1. I like to put real estate in either an LLC or Land trust. Or you can encumber a property with a credit line or a mortgage through an entity you own.
2. Legitimate Retirement accounts like IRA's and 401K's are generally untouchable and ungarnishable.
3. Many small business owners in service related businesses have generally shell corporations. They are legitimate but have few assets such as a checking account. The few assets can be generally be moved to another entity fairly quickly. S-Corps and LLCs are good entities and relatively inexpensive to create.
4. There is a concept of "financial and asset protection friends" who do favors for each other. They are 3rd party, non-related parties that agree to be your trustee or hold assets.
5. Chapter 7 bankruptcy disposes a judgment as well as ALL debts and releases you from nearly all liabilities you might have.
However, keep in mind there is no really fool-proof way of protecting everything if someone is willing to spend enough to come after you. The idea is to dissuade them due to costs, not entirely prevent them. In any case, the cost of employing such mechanisms also have an inherent time, energy, and money cost. For some, it isn't worth the hassles and expense. There are pros and cons to executing such asset protection strategies. I myself use them to ensure more asset privacy but also make it very costly for someone to come after me. I have a few "financial friends" who come to me to get my opinions on such matters in an unofficial capacity. I am not a lawyer but I am not afraid to say that I know more about asset protection than most run-of-the-mill lawyers and they know that. I am part of an informal network of small business owners who studied up on this many years ago and we know the world can be a litigious place and we take steps to dissuade people from benefiting from lawsuits they might file.
Having said all that, Getty needs to file 100 lawsuits before it crosses over into the 1%-5% range of risk. They did a PR stunt on filing 5 lawsuits earlier this year. The uninformed fell for it. We had people all up in arms about it until we did the analysis. The smart people who read ELI got the true context that because Getty issues so many letters per year that filing 10-20 lawsuits per years is still a statistical blip in the big scheme of things. And even with those lawsuits, the settlement will not likely bankrupt anyone. Let us also not forget, they hand-picked those lawsuits. They were not arbitrary.
If I had to get an extortion letter from any big company, Getty is the one to get it from because the membership of victims from its extortion letter victim is legion.
Also, a shameless self-promotion.... sometime in the future I will be writing and releasing information never publicly revealed before about Getty and other copyright extortionists I have dealt with since 2008. The ELI Team have been fighting legal battles behind the scenes since our enemies have engaged in very surreptitious methods to "contain" us and shut us up. It is going to be both informative and "gossipy". My new blog,
http://Defiantly.net will be the home of future announcements and updates.
New here-got my first Getty letter about a year ago, followed by 2 recent McCormack letters, giving me a deadline to pay, followed by a "courtesy extension" of that deadline for 2 weeks. They want 2 grand for 3 images which actually cost about 100.00 total. Haven't decided whether to ignore, use Oscar, or try to negotiate directly to get their demand down.
In the event they sue and win some outrageous judgement, I would love to make it an expensive and meaningless "victory" for them for them. Any opinions about protecting assets, such as houses, vehicles, salary/wage protections, 401ks, possible inheritances, moving from DBA/Sole Proprietorship to LLC, etc.. would be appreciated. I live in Florida.
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