Do You Need a Foreign Asset Protection Trust?

How to get free international asset protection information –

Asset protection, as regular readers of this blog will know, has changed in the last few years. Whereas in the past business asset protection basically meant keeping your assets safe from creditors who might want to sue you (think McDonalds being sued for hot coffee spills) or from ex-spouses wanting more than their fair share… today the threats have changed. Even moderately wealthy people need to apply asset protection techniques, for example, on their retirement funds. Retirement funds includes any nest egg you have built up. The protection you need is against devaluation, inflation, or just plain seizure by the government. A good foreign asset protection trust can hedge your risk and expand your possibilities – not just to protect your assets, but also to see them grow and flourish!

We have already seen the governments of France, Hungary and Argentina forcing taxpayers to move retirement funds out of private pension plans into state-backed plans. The way governments in the US and Europe are printing money these days, we at Q Wealth think that’s a particularly bad idea.

How would this work, for example, in the case of the USA? Simply, the government would reduce the flexibility of IRAs. Right now, Americans who don’t want full exposure to the collapsing dollar can choose to invest their retirement accounts in tangible things like gold, real estate, or offshore bank accounts containing foreign currencies that are expected to do better. In future, these options may be described as ‘too dangerous’ for people to invest their retirement funds in. Instead, government bonds will be promoted as a safer, more conservative asset to invest in. Of course, US government bonds are nothing more than IOUs, and we would argue they are about the most dangerous thing you could invest in right now.

The same situation applies in most other countries, especially in Europe and Australia. There is more and more government pressure to invest retirement funds and pensions into ‘secure’ government debt. It is against this kind of threat that a foreign or international asset protection trust structure can be useful.

An asset protection trust can be either stand-alone, in the case of regular savings – or it can be incorporated into tax-advantaged pension plans like Roth IRAs in the USA or SIPPs in the UK. In the latter case, the trust is owned by the plan itself, while you the investor maintain full control over the trustee, that can be a foreign LLC. Typically we work with offshore asset protection jurisdictions like Nevis and the Cook Islands, or with New Zealand for those seeking an onshore, non-resident asset protection trust.

In my consulting firm we set structures using basic asset protection techniques like this up frequently for clients who are concerned about protecting their assets from nationalization of their retirement savings as described above. Using these simple techniques, you can obtain full tax compliant asset protection. If it sounds like something you would like to learn more about, we have prepared a free report on Asset Protection that you can download right now, without any cost or obligation. It focuses specifically on Nevis, the jurisdiction that probably has the best asset protection trusts legislation in the world. Click here now to obtain your copy, so you can become your own expert in asset protection!

Our next project, that we are working on right now, is a report for Q Wealth Members on Private Trust Companies – a great cutting-edge asset protection technique to counteract the hesitation many clients rightly have about trusting other people with their assets. Our New Zealand report, Trusting in Trusts, covers the use of PTCs or Private Trust Companies in some detail already, for anyone who is interested in finding out more.