Protect Your Real Estate from Court Actions, Liens, Judgments

Introduction – We are going to spell out a plan to protect your real estate from all sorts of court actions except secured creditor actions like a foreclosure. This strategy will also remove your name from any real estate thus diminishing your target potential for onerous litigation. This is written from a USA perspective but can be adopted to work in other countries readily. This is not going to work if your real estate has conventional bank or lender financing on it at present. They will probably not let the mortgage debt transfer without personal guarantees from you and these guarantees can create large gaps in the structure. Why would you guarantee the debt personally if you did not have a vested ownership interest in the real estate is the problem. Nothing here is intended to be tax advice, tax planning or any other sort or type of tax counsel or advice. This is an asset protection strategy.

Real Estate Asset Protection First Layer – What is done is a USA corporation is formed. We suggest Delaware, Nevada or Wyoming. The real estate is then put in the name of this domestic corporation.

Real Estate Asset Protection Second Layer – The USA corporation has as its registered owner the offshore corporation. We prefer to use a Nevis LLC. Nevis is more anonymous than Panama and the other popular jurisdictions. The LLC has bearer membership shares which do not have to be kept in Nevis. Nevis is a tax haven and you will not incur any Nevis taxes. The due diligence does not require and bank references or lawyer references. Only a notarized copy of passport and driver license is required.

Real Estate Asset Protection Third Layer – The Nevis LLC is owned by an Offshore Trust. We can use a New Zealand based Trust which will make things even more confusing for a USA attorney who has not a clue as to how these structures operate. When the attorney for the other side gets confused he gets scared and then the price his client has to pay goes up. This is a desired effect and has a very discouraging effect on your financial adversaries. Remember the attorney on the other side has to be careful. If he charges his client a lot of money and fails to get the real estate, his client can bring an action against the lawyer and win. Lawyers have deep pockets due to malpractice insurance. There are plenty of lawyers running around who love to sue other lawyers. Remember the other sides lawyer will probably not even have a clue as to what you did or what to do about it. Their line of defense is going to be to try to force you to give them enough information to set the structure aside as a straw man structure that you really do in fact own and then the lawyer can have at the real estate. We of course are structuring things so he cannot do this.

How the Real Estate Asset Protection Structure Flows – The real estate is now owned by a USA corporation which is in turn owned by an Offshore LLC that in turn has an Offshore Trust as it's owner. You can be a beneficiary of this trust or not. You could also add in another trust or offshore corporation to be a beneficiary of this trust to avoid you having to state in a deposition that you are the owner of the property. A deposition might go like this. Do you own the real estate in question? No. Who does? Name the USA corporation? Do you own the USA corporation? No. Who does? Name the Nevis LLC owns the USA corp. Do you own the Nevis LLC? No. Who does? Why don't you ask them? Let me redirect the question, who owns the Nevis LLC? I do not own it, so ask them. Your lawyer then says “Objection your honor my client has twice answered the question”. Counselor move on, the witness has answered the question.

Notice you told no lies and committed no perjury. The Nevis LLC is owned by a trust. You can avoid listing yourself as the beneficiary of the first trust if you are expecting to be in court or in depositions under oath. Then it would be hard to portray you as an owner of the real estate even by proxy. Another way to get there is to have another corporation or trust as a beneficiary of the first trust that owns the LLC. You could control these subsequent downstream structures. The structures can be made extremely confusing, especially for a USA lawyer who is not used to these bearer share anonymous structures and Trusts especially when the lawyer cannot access these filings in any public registry or database. These corporation and trust records are not available in the public registries. The Trusts we use are not recorded in any public registry or database yet are officiated and lawful. Nevis has no public registry.

Only the Nevis government and Nevis lawyers can access the corporation database in Nevis. To bring any sort of court case in Nevis the adversary would need to post a $25,000 cash bond to the court in Nevis. So any attempt to untangle the web we wove by getting the records from Nevis would require not only hiring a Nevis attorney (think at least $10,000 to go to court just for corporate records, not a real lawsuit for money damages) but also posting a $25,000 cash bond. On top of all this they would probably lose due to a lack of authority or improper venue. Nevis does not stay in business by making it easy for people to sue there and get into corporate and banking records. This is evidenced by their requirement for posting the $25,000 cash bond.

The Lease – If you wish to live on the property then a lease should be put in place between you and the USA corporation. One of the nominees from the Nevis LLC can sign the lease since the Nevis LLC owns the USA corp. If the USA corporation receives rental income it will need to declare this on the income tax filing for the corporation. It can offset all the real estate maintenance expenses, property taxes, legal fees, etc. The lease serves to document that you do not “own” the property in that why would you lease your own property.

Annuities – You can incur a taxable event by shifting the real estate title into the USA corporation name. This can be dealt with by receiving consideration. One way is to set up an annuity. The real estate annuity pays you say $250 a year for 30 years and then a balloon payment. So let your financial enemies file an attachment, judgment, lien or levy on the monthly payments since it will be paid to an offshore bank account their attachment will be of no consequence and probably not worth the trouble and expense. Court judgments run ten years and are renewable sometimes for another ten years but thirty years will run out the statue.

Cost – The basic structure consist of a USA corporation. We do not provide these but Nevada, Wyoming and Delaware corporations are readily available for several hundred dollars on the internet. Have the offshore structure set up first since you are going to be listing the offshore corporation as the beneficiary owner of the USA corporation and thus you will need the name and particulars of this offshore corporation (the Nevis LLC). So the Nevis LLC and the Offshore New Zealand based Trust costs $3500 along with the necessary paperwork to complete the structure.

If you wish to add in another trust (Anguilla based) or Panama Foundation to be the beneficiary of the first trust then the fee is $5000.

These structures have no bank account. If you sign as the signatory/beneficiary owner of a bank account using the Nevis LLC you can defeat the structure since you are an owner on the bank records. If you need a bank account best to use a different corporation for this purpose.

The cost of the USA corporation is additional and we do not sell these but they are readily available on the internet for a few hundred dollars.

Time Frame – Two to three weeks.

Documentation – We need a notarized color copy of a passport and driver license.

Questions Welcome.