trust attorney california
You’ve worked hard to build a nest egg: cash, investments, properties, and more. But all these assets could be lost in an instant through a lawsuit—even when the lawsuit isn’t your fault. After you’re gone, similar threats could devastate the assets you leave to your loved ones—often through no fault of their own. For example, many people, after inheriting and turning (“transmuting”) their separate property inheritance to community property, find that they lose half when the other spouse decides to divorce the person inheriting.
Let’s look at some key legal strategies you can implement now, before the threat arrives. Indeed, in general these strategies only work if put in place well in advance of trouble. Asset Protection While You’re Alive: Private Retirement Plans We’ll start with protecting your assets while you’re still alive. California offers its citizens plenty of legal challenges, but we are blessed by a law which allows us to create something called a Private Retirement Plan. A California PRP is much more than a mere financial plan. It includes the creation of a Private Retirement Trust, careful retitling of assets, and a written actuarial plan—all of which must be created by professionals.
At the risk of oversimplification, using a PRP, you carefully identify certain assets as “retirement assets,” after which you are allowed to build a sturdy legal wall around them, greatly improving protection from creditors and predators of many kinds. Indeed, the purpose of the law is to protect identified assets so they can be used in retirement. You can’t quite protect all of your assets, but a savvy lawyer, working with a specialized trust administrator, can help you safeguard your key investments, properties, and more against things like lawsuits and creditors—while leaving you in control of those assets, and benefitting from them over time.
CunninghamLegal
5950 Canoga Ave Suite 240 Woodland Hills, CA 91367 (818) 594-0500