Protecting Your Personal Assets With A Corp
With the small amount of knowledge I have come upon in looking into starting my own business, I found that a Corp will allow you to protect your personal assets from lawsuits and insurance claims. Such as if you were to close shop or file bankruptcy, your personal property is protected from any claims, judgements, or liens..ect since everything is under the umbrella of the corporation.
With that being said, a relative is a personal injury attorney, and from experience when she represents a client, they can go after just about every insurance company that the defendants is tied to (i.e. car, home, ..ect). Therefore, I know that if something was to happen during construction on a property, that it is possible that any claims could be filled even against my own personal property insurance ...ect.
That being said, my question finally is, what about putting together a corporation that I use to purchase my properties and insurance through that corporation would cover the properties? Therefore, protecting my personal property from any claims that occured on my RE properties.
Can anyone elaborate on this, or set me straight as if this is a serious possibility? Maybe someone has some experience in trade-offs if this is a possibility?
A trust provides absolutely no legal protection.
The purpose of a trust is to hide your assets so that if someone is looking to sue you, they will not see all of the real estate that you own...just your personal property such as your house and cars.
As soon as someone is a) looking to sue you and b) finds out you have all your property in a trust, they will file a lawsuit with one of the best lawyers they can find.[ Edited by joecrane on Date 05/17/2005 ]