Wealth management planning, as regular readers of my articles will know, has changed drastically 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 or offshore trust can help you hedge your risk and expand your possibilities – not just to protect your assets, but also to see them grow and flourish in a secure offshore environment!
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, doing so would seem like a particularly bad idea.
How would this work, for example, in the case of the USA?
Simply, if the government found itself in need of more cash, it could 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 multi-currency 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. Good offshore jurisdictions to work with include Nevis and the Cook Islands, or New Zealand for those seeking an onshore, non-resident asset protection trust.