Family First Firm
Asset Protection Planning - Safeguarding What You’ve Built
You’ve worked hard to build your legacy. Now it’s time to protect it from creditors, long-term care costs, and even financial missteps by future heirs.
Asset Protection
Estate planning isn’t complete without asset protection. While wills and trusts determine who inherits your estate, asset protection strategies ensure there’s actually something left to pass on. By acting now, you can preserve wealth for yourself, your spouse, and future generations.
Without careful planning, your assets are exposed to:
- Creditors and lawsuits
- Nursing home and long-term care costs
- Poor financial decisions by heirs
Asset Protection Strategies
The right approach depends on your property, financial situation, and goals. Our attorneys evaluate your entire situation, then design strategies that align with your personal and family objectives.
Common strategies include:
- Establishing Trusts: Safeguarding assets for your family while preserving eligibility for programs like Medicaid.
- Shielding Property from Judgment Orders: Protecting business owners, professionals, or families from creditors and liability claims.
- Preparing for Long-Term Care: Ensuring nursing home costs don’t consume your life savings.
- Protecting Heirs: Structuring inheritances so they’re preserved and distributed responsibly.
Asset Protection for Families
It takes grit and hard work to accumulate wealth, and foresight to protect it.
- For yourself and your spouse: Asset protection planning can prevent the need to liquidate everything to afford medical or long-term care costs.
- For your parents: If they don’t have an asset protection plan in place, their estate may already be at risk. Planning now can save both assets and stress.
- For your heirs: Even the most responsible heirs may face divorce, lawsuits, or financial strain. A well-structured trust ensures assets are distributed in ways that protect your legacy and your loved ones’ security.
How to Safeguard Assets
Trusts are a powerful tool to shield assets against these threats. There are multiple types, each tailored to different needs, from protecting retirement accounts to preserving inheritances. Our attorneys identify the right opportunities to reduce risk while maintaining your family’s access to resources.
Whether you’re a business owner or an individual with accumulated wealth, your assets could be exposed to:
- Business liabilities
- Civil judgments
- Predatory creditors
- Healthcare debts
Asset Protection vs. Estate Planning
At Family First Firm, we integrate both, ensuring your legacy is protected today and preserved for tomorrow. While closely related, these two strategies serve different purposes:
- Estate Planning: Estate planning is more concerned with the allocation and distribution of your properties in anticipation of incapacitation or death, which will be carried out according to the terms of your trusts in coordination with your will.
- Asset Protection: Asset protection strategies, on the other hand, can be commenced during your lifetime to shield assets from creditors, so they will remain available to your family in the long term.
Family First Firm
- Individually-Oriented Solutions: Every family’s situation is unique, so we design strategies to fit your needs and goals.
- Support at Every Step: From creating trusts to managing benefits, we handle the heavy lifting so you don’t have to.
- Recognized & Trusted: Named one of the fastest-growing firms in the U.S. by Law Firm 500 and Inc. 5000, and Florida’s highest-rated elder law firm.
- Accessible & Compassionate: Approachable attorneys, flexible scheduling, and a proven track record of protecting Florida families.
Family First Firm
Asset Protection FAQs
Asset protection refers to the tools and strategies to guard property and wealth. There are several options for safeguarding different types of property or accounts from issues involving creditors, taxes, liabilities, or mismanagement. Asset protection also helps seniors be less susceptible to scammers.
The elderly are often in the precarious position of having amassed assets while facing threats that did not exist when they were younger. Beyond the obvious reason of holding onto what you’ve worked a lifetime to accrue, we can help clients protect assets in order to qualify for Medicaid without draining their savings, make it more difficult for scammers to take advantage, and guarding wealth against taxation, judgments, seizures and other legal liabilities.
Since every family is different, we may employ one or more of the following asset protection strategies:
- Trusts (including our Family Fortress Trust)
- Retirement and long-term care planning
- Establishing joint tenancies
- Setting up LLCs or other business entities
- Acquisition of protected assets
- Other safeguards that prevent property from being seized in a judgment
Asset Protection Trusts, abbreviated as APTs, are a type of irrevocable trust. Funds from the trust can still be accessed, but distributions are at the discretion of an independent party. A Family Fortress Trust is a type of irrevocable trust that combines asset protection with Medicaid Planning to safeguard assets.
Rather than seeking an irrevocable trust lawyer or an asset protection law firm, it often helps to focus on a more holistic family strategy. That is why we designed our Family Fortress Trust. You can protect your family’s assets and future while positioning your loved ones to avoid many costs that tend to blindside people in their elder years.
Perhaps the better question to ask is this: “Can a trust help you avoid nursing home costs?”
Yes, the right kind of trust can greatly assist you with exorbitant nursing home expenses by helping you qualify for Medicaid. Medicaid eligibility requires years of proper planning, guided by an asset protection law firm focused on elder law concerns. By working with Family First Firm to implement a Family Fortress Trust, you can shield assets that might otherwise compromise your eligibility for Medicaid assistance. You can do so without depriving a loved one of the income from the assets in that trust.
The average monthly cost of a nursing home in Florida is around $10,000, which increases by about 10% yearly. Imagine how quickly savings can vanish when more than $100,000 is being expended to pay nursing home fees! Understandably, Florida families come to Family First Law Firm looking for solutions to avoid these six-figure outlays. An asset protection lawyer at Family First Firm can help you strategize elder law concerns, such as qualifying for Medicaid with long-term care options in mind.