October 18, 2005

By John Dietz, Senior Advisor of Trustmakers

Today I am concerned about the very basics of Asset Protection. Not so much the structure, but the reasons and the motivation to act and structure a plan today. We have some serious times ahead. The rule book is again changing. Asset Protection “bankruptcy style” is now no longer an option for most of our readers.

Recently, I spoke with a California attorney who is convinced that a charging order does not hold up anymore in his state. A Florida lobbyist told me that he had the inside track on new legislation that would repeal his state’s benevolent homestead provision. Alan Greenspan is retiring officially in January. Whether you like him or not, he has been the one constant in our world for quite awhile. “He’s been around so long, I fully expect an encore performance,” said the CNBC economic pundit.

Every piece of junk mail I get claims the hot real estate market will soon go bust. One columnist quoted, “The day they stopped buying.” China’s currency has been staged to float against a basket of currencies instead of being pegged to the greenback, which means the Chinese government will sooner or later sell dollars and buy other currencies, while at the same time putting more downward pressure on the dollar. The IRS will be closing a few tax loopholes on several estate planning products in the near future. There is lots of news, and if it seems difficult to keep up, well it is.

Computer Problems.
Most of the computer using public has had at some point in time a hard drive failure or some meltdown. Recently, my hard drive decided to stop functioning. We are talking about a six-month-old, state of the art product that while sitting there quietly on its own, and without warning, decided to stop working. One day it was fine, the next day it wasn’t. It’s like losing your wallet, your family, your money and a whole lot of your history in one nanosecond.

"Simple back-up procedures and a host of easy solutions can solve any hard drive failure," so the experts say. When I asked the professional why the crash, I heard every reason from not having "enough resources" to a "glitch in the operating system." One comment was, “You have no idea how much is running in the background of your computer...the things you don’t see going on.” Many programs attach themselves like the monster in the movie “Alien.”

If you have read any of my material, the mantra is always the same: Asset Protection is taking steps to reduce anything that causes your net worth to decrease. No one knows if selling off dollars by the Chinese is going to affect the greenback; no one knows when you may loose all of your gains in real estate; and no one knows if Greenspan’s retirement will propel the markets upward or downward. My computer was fine and then in one split second it wasn’t.

Enough said. Get Asset Protected while things are fine…

Until next time,

John

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