Uncategorized

To protect personal assets as a California LLC owner, you need a layered asset protection strategy rather than relying on the LLC alone. This includes maintaining clear separation between personal and business finances, using appropriate insurance coverage, structuring ownership carefully, and combining LLC […]

The Private Retirement Trust (“PRT”) is a flexible, tax-neutral retirement planning tool designed to help California residents — including non-U.S.-citizen residents — fund and administer a nonqualified Private Retirement Plan in a way that leverages California’s unique creditor exemption statute. Although the statute is […]

Properly funding a Private Retirement Trust (“PRT”) is crucial to preserving the exemption protection provided to private retirement plans under California Code of Civil Procedure § 704.115(b). The statute allows you to recharacterize nonexempt personal assets — assets that can be taken by creditors […]

Exemption planning is rarely at the top of anyone’s to-do list. For California residents, though, it should be. The generous exemption protection provided for Private Retirement Plans under California Code of Civil Procedure § 704.115(b) preserves and protects retirement plan assets at the expense of […]

To qualify for the exemption protection of California Code of Civil Procedure § 704.115(b), a Private Retirement Plan must be principally or primarily designed and used for retirement purposes. Subjective intent alone is not enough. A person cannot simply designate certain assets as retirement […]

Meet Sam, an Orange County business owner who was just named as a defendant in a lawsuit. Sam is 50 years old. He has spent the last few years thinking about his future retirement and his desire to establish a Private Retirement Trust, but, […]

A properly designed Private Retirement Plan is not enough to capture the exemption protection of CCP § 704.115. The plan must also be principally or primarily used for retirement purposes. The statute itself does not provide any rules regarding plan administration that, if followed, […]

Safeguarding retirement assets with a Private Retirement Plan is a must, but doing so with an Employee Retirement Income Security Act (“ERISA”) qualified plan is not always an easy feat. ERISA compliance requires strict adherence to a substantial body of statutory regulations that frequently […]

Not all Private Retirement Trusts (“PRTs”) are created equal. To illustrate this point — and the importance of checking off every box when creating a PRT — it is worth examining a recent case in which a Private Retirement Trust failed to survive judicial […]