By Lee R. Phillips

This is a warning.  The banks have put together bundles of 200 – 500 houses and sold them for pennies on the dollar to investors.  The investors have turned into seminar promoters, built fancy websites, and hit everybody with a names list to resell the houses.  I have a number of my students (on the order of a dozen) who have bought the $15,000 REO bargain houses at seminars.  They are in lawsuits with the folks that sold them the houses, and it is just ugly.

I was approached a year or so ago by several groups that wanted to market bundles of houses to my students.  I carefully evaluated them (both the promoters and the houses).  I got a number of lists of the houses and looked at the properties.  They were in Detroit, Cleveland, Cape Coral, and other places.  Most were in the war zones.  After evaluation, I was sure I didn’t want anything to do with the deals, and I certainly wasn’t going to get my students involved. (more…)

By Lee R. Phillips

The hot shot speakers and the hot shot lawyers go through elaborate plans where one trust owns the corporation or LLC and then that company owns another trust. One of the favorite structures is for a corporation to be the general partner of a limited partnership, thus making it so you’re not personally liable as the general partner.  I have seen many structures where a corporation is the owner of all of the person’s LLCs.

All of this is done to get multiple layers of asset protection.  If they get through one “corporate shield”, then the other ones will maybe hold.  These schemes add a lot of cost to your asset protection plan.  The lawyer gets his fee for each entity that is established.  There are state fees for many of the entities (basically everything but trusts).  I have seen these types of structures collapse under their own weight.  Remember, a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. (more…)