Overview of Asset Protection
Your affluent clients depend on you to be a source of information on a wide variety of complex topics. They assume you are at least informed about every area even marginally related to your core business. One such area is asset protection.
As a financial advisor, you seek to create steady growth of your clients’ assets and help them avoid losses and exposures to things like market risk and income and estate taxes. A natural extension of this stewardship is making sure the growth you are fostering, as well as the balance of your clients’ assets, is safe from exposure to an increasingly predatory and hostile litigation system. Some of your clients have obvious exposures, such as a physician’s potential malpractice exposure or the enduring liability that a large commercial contractor faces. Other sources of exposure are more insidious, such as merely being wealthy and visible, owning income property, or something as simple as owning and driving a car every day. We are at a point in our litigation system at which we have over 70,000 lawsuits filed per day, many without any real merit. Unfortunately being “right” is not enough to keep our clients safe.