All Forum Posts by: Mike S.

Florida LLC members are public records.

There are two ways I know of to keep privacy in Florida.

The first one, and probably the best for asset protection in case of single member LLC since FTC vs Olmstead is to have this LLC owned by a WY LLC. The WY LLC being anonymous, the FL LLC records will point to it stopping the trail there.

The second option is to have the member as a trust. The trust being not recorded, you won’t find the beneficiary.

Last, for titling a property in FL don’t forget the land trust option. FL is the only state where land trust statutes offers also some level of additional liability protection and also gives great anonymity.

@Julianne Croegaert

I use multiple LLC between all my different properties to insulate each of them. All these LLC are single member, owned by a WY holding multi member LLC.

The only tax burden is the WY LLC reporting. Each sub LLC have no tax reporting at all and it does not matter if I have 5 or 30 of them.

The only additional cost is the yearly state fee and registered agent cost for each LLC. This could be avoided by using series LLC in state where this option exist but be certain to educate yourself about the pro and cons of those to make an informed decision.

Each additional LLC may also need its own bank account and some annual paperwork and member meeting. You may commingle account with a management company but you will have to be extra careful with your book keeping. Personably I prefer to have a different free bank accounts for each company. They are all at the same bank and I can do online transfer from one account to the other in seconds.

@Eve Oliver

First, do not use a quit claim deed but instead a (special) warranty deed.

Second, I would assume that you have a mortgage if you had to talk to your bank. Depending on your lender and your contract, they may consider that your transfer would trigger the due on sale clause. Do a search on this term here, and you will find many threads explaining the issue and possible solutions to avoid it.

Last, if you are unsure how to do it, I would highly suggest that you contact a lawyer to draft your deed as some states and counties have mandatory specific clauses that need to appear in the deed. Most real estate attorney won’t charge too much for a simple deed without a title search.

@Jean Bolger

I got very bad experience with Wells Fargo and HELOC.

So bad that I had to file multiple complaints and hire a lawyer as they were not following their own contract. They conveniently “lost” multiple registered letters and faxe. They changed the executive charges of my file every month, using that a as an excuse asking for more time to research the file. Only after I filed a lawsuit against them did they started slowly moving forward.

As a result I swore to myself not to have anything to do with these thieves anymore. I was a high value customer with WF for decades. I closed over 15 banks accounts to get away from these constant aggravations banking with them.

Felony: no discretion.

Misdemeanor: discretion

But the agency policy may also restrict the discretion on some specific violations.

Again this is one way of setting it up. It may be overkill for your specific situation or not enough (maybe you would need adding offshore asset protection too). That is why you should probably consult a lawyer and CPA specialized in asset protection and real estate to discuss with you what would fit you best. You can tweak it by changing some of the entities (like using series LLCs), or using DST in high cost LLC state like CA. You can also put more than one property in one entity if your risk tolerance is higher.

But educating yourself on all the pro and con of these entities is probably a must before meeting with your legal & tax team.

Last, but not least, when the structure is created, you need to maintain it. If you don't understand it or don't know how to use it, it would become useless and maybe dangerous (creating more liability, cost and/or tax burden). You should understand before going down that route what are the requirements and cost involved over the life of it.

You will also create other side effect that you need to assess (cost of lending in an entity vs person, tax reporting, commercial insurance, need to use a lawyer to represent your entity in court, ...)

Once you know all the factors, only you can decide if it worth it or not. Some would argue that a simple liability insurance would be enough. In my case, based on my specific factors, I concluded that it was not enough. It may be for you.

To further educate yourself, I am a big fan of Clint Coons Youtube channel that has hours of sound strategies.

First regarding the civil issue, as said before law enforcement has no jurisdiction... When you want to divorce with your spouse, are you calling the cop or a lawyer?

There are a lot of reasons why they maybe could not enforce the warrant.

As explained before, maybe there was no extradition for that jurisdiction.

Also in case of a misdemeanor warrant, in some state it would not give authority to the police to enter into their residence to pick them up. They could be picked up while on the street but not in their home. A felony warrant would often give entry authority into their residence, but not one of another unless an additional search warrant is obtained.

There are also differences between capias and warrants in some jurisdiction that would give different limits for enforcement.

Don't believe all the cop shows on TV. There is a lot more to that job than meet the eye.

Each LLC is its own box. In case of internal liability, you risk loosing all the content of the box.

If you put all your properties in the same box, an attack into one risks all of them. So yes, depending on the value of each property, it may be better to have one local LLC per property. All of them owned by a WY holding LLC.

Generally a revocable trust only provides anonymity. It does not provide asset protection. If you have ten trusts into one LLC, the only asset protection entity is the LLC. So if one trust is attacked, you may loose the nine others.

I am not a lawyer so you would like to talk to one, but here is the setup I eventually adopted for myself after consulting a few attorneys.

Each rental property is titled into a Land Trust, each land trust has a local separate single member LLC as beneficiary. All the local LLCs are owned by a WY holding LLC. This WY holding LLC also hold my non dangerous assets (brokerage account, bank accounts, etc...).

The WY holding LLC is managed by a C-corp, that is also 1% member of the WY LLC. This Corp is the public face of my operation. It acts as landlord, manage all the companies, and give me the fringe tax benefits available to a C-corp.

The 99% holder of my WY LLC is my living trust. This trust only purpose is to avoid probate. I have also a pour over will and advanced directive. I wouldn't put some of my personal property into the WY holding LLC, as it may weaken your protection, a case could be made that the LLC is becoming your alter ego and piercing its veil. For these few personal asset, for anonymity purpose, I created a few personal property trusts to mask the title ownership of some of assets (car, ...).

I have created a separate NM LLC to act as trustee of my land trusts and property trusts. NM LLCs do not have great asset protection statutes, but they are very cheap and anonymous and as trustee, you don't get really any liability per se anyway.

@Michael Aschenbrenner

I would avoid putting your AZ LLC as trustee, especially for personal properties. I would use a different LLC as trustee. Also to my knowledge the trust won't add any liability protection but only anonymity and probate avoidance.

I agree with the concept of having single member, member managed AZ LLCs owned by a WY holding LLC.

@James Horton

If it was your primary residence for more than 2 years during the last 5 years you may want to create a corporation to sell it to it to get the section 121 exclusion if your property has gained a lot of value since you purchased it.

http://clintcoonsblog.com/2017/04/10/sell-your-home-to-yourself-for-tax-free-income/

You can even make an installment sale to receive tax free money over the next few years from it.