Our last newsletter was meant to help you start your year off in the right direction by giving you helpful and simple tips for how you can not only grow your business and make more money, but also provide much better service in the process. To read that newsletter, please click here.
The goal of the Asset Protection Society is to “protect the public” and try to regulate the advice being given on the very important subject matter of Asset Protection. The APS™ hopes to set the standard of care for what is compliant or “good” asst protection planning and what is not.
John Dietz, Co-Founder of the Asset Protection Society, created the following newsletter to take you to the next step. . . to move you from thoughts to actions.
______________________________________________________________
I hope your New Year was pleasant and healthy and that you had time to reflect and gain perspective on what is a priority in your life. Today’s discussion is grounded in promoting action instead of merely getting you to think.
When deciding when is the right time to take action to protect your assets (or that of your clients), the following comments are something worth thinking about.
Why is it we all wait until the last minute; why is that we put important life decisions off until we really need too? There is a perfectly logical explanation as presented by Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1747). Everybody continues in a state of rest, or in uniform motion, until compelled to change that state by forces imposed upon it (Newton’s First Law).
In reality, the result is not the difficult part to achieve, it is initiating the change that is difficult to achieve. What then stimulates us to make this change? We know for certain that “threat” is an absolute stimulation, and we face these calls daily, but for many their action to protect their assets is simply too late and falls into a fraudulent conveyance.
As we also learned from Sir Isaac Newton, not all forces are equal. However, the force applied is equal and in the same direction of acceleration in physics and in debtor-creditor law. Once a person has a pending suit, their want to protect their assets is “swift and eager.” These external threats (initiated by an outside party or event) definitely heighten the emotion surrounding the decision-making. Here are some current examples and situations of “external” threats.
|
Any one of these situations would prompt someone to want to protect their assets. In these cases, there are “third parties” who want to be the “takers”. These scenarios are imminent and scary! These are the situations where a third party is looming to reach out and take what is yours (rightfully or wrongfully), but the scary thing is that you have no control. The best-case scenario is a potential out of court settlement if you put a rocky road in front of the plaintiff. If the door is open, creditors will walk in and take all; it happens everyday to naïve, unaware and negligent defendants.
Occasionally, I get a phone call from someone, usually a young person, who says, “I’ve started this venture (or business) and along with my every effort to be successful, I want to protect what I am building” and “I want to protect my home and pension for the next generation, what do I have to do?”Hallelujah! The internal light bulb does go off for some!
These people have felt some internal movement of awareness stimulating their intuitive inertia. Maybe it is their “hunch”, maybe it is their awareness and education, but they understand the changes in society and truly feel the “shifts.”
Change is not easy by any means. I think that Robert F. Kennedy (1925-1968) summed up “change” accurately. Great change dominates the world everyday; either we change with it, or become its’ victim. In idealism, a wise person believes that “all that survives is change” and “only the strong only survive through change.”
I believe that this is the right time of the year and the right time in history for all people to initiate Asset Protection Plans.
What are you doing to protect your own assets?
What are you doing to help your clients protect their assets?
Now is the time to act and be proactive when it comes to protecting your wealth and that of your clients.
Until next time,
John Dietz