Bernard Madoff got his 150 years in the slammer. That’s a life sentence by any book. I’m still interested to know how many of the billions he stole can be recovered. Who gets the benefit of his “work”? Ruth? The Kids? Who gets what and what can be recovered will depend on how many of the asset protection tools they have used. It would be physically impossible for an individual to spend $65 Billion. There has to be assets someplace.

Most of the assets may be beyond the reach of the prosecutors. Yes, a lot of the assets may have gone offshore. The authorities can go get most of those. By the way, “offshore accounts” aren’t really a way to protect assets today. The US has a very long reach since the Patriot act was passed after 9/11. These days few if any are going to be protecting assets offshore. It is way too expensive, and it doesn’t give you the asset protection you are told that it will give you. (more…)

American’s like to guard their children. I like to guard my children. It is really true that there is no scorn like a woman’s scorn. You can insult me, and I will quite easily forgive and forget, but don’t take on my children, you will have an enemy for life. Just ask David Letterman about a woman’s scorn. I’m sure he has told any number of Sarah Palin jokes, but once he started in on her daughter, things became really ugly, and I think most American’s were disgusted with Letterman’s joke no matter which daughter it involved. With Letterman’s apology the whole incident may be ended, but I’ll bet Sarah Palin won’t easily forget, after all it was her daughter that was insulted.

It is interesting to me that with all the time and effort we give to our children, many of us neglect our final responsibility to our children. As an estate planning attorney, I often see real family tragedies involving children whose parents have not taken the time to protect them before they were orphaned. (more…)

In March I decided that with mortgage rates so low, I should refinance one of my rental properties that had a 7% loan. The rent I get is pretty much break even, I have a great credit score and about 40% of the property was paid off so I figured there wouldn’t be much of a problem. I played around with a couple of different mortgage brokers for three months and finally was told that they could not get me a loan because I owned more than 3 properties. I was shocked. The reality is that rates for loans are great, but qualifying is a lot harder than it used to be.

Finally a neighbor told me she got refinancing at a local bank. I got the name of her loan officer and he was also able to help me. As I was processing the papers he told me that his bank had never gone into risky lending and as a result they still had funds to lend and had not had to get government stimulus funds. If you want to refinance and you qualify, the best places to apply are local credit unions, and banks.

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