Your Business - Asset Protection

Today’s economy has many contractors on the ropes - acquiring work requires the sharpest of pencils while estimating projects. Clients and General Contractors require more and more for the absolute lowest costs, which reduces out profits to extremely small levels. These are the times that we face today, we all hope for better times soon. Today we deal with what is available to us and make choices that have impacts on not only our families but also our employees and their families as well. This is a responsibility that I always felt very strongly about, as I am sure that many of you do.

During the past few months we have been looking into buying properties, our belief is that we are nearing the bottom of the economic slide - we hope.  Lots of opportunities are available in the residential market. Upon further investigation we decided that not only could we do well personally from this decision but that if structured correctly we could position ourselves to help some of the people that have lost their homes via foreclosure in either renting or perhaps finding them an option that could get them back into a home of their own. Lofty dreams - but where are we if we do not dream? As may be obvious we are big believers in training so we have embarked on training in the residential market to make sure that we made as few mistakes as possible - we are after all still looking to make a profit. Many of the classes we have taken have been excellent and have resulted in several opportunities that would not have come to us without the training.

The area that has really embarrassed me is that of asset protection. Over the years we have been able to build up a few items that should help us over our golden years. Many of these assets we have had for many years, some a couple of decades and we have left ourselves venerable on everyone of them up until two weeks ago. Today those assets are protected from lawsuits and should something happen to either my wife or I those assets would be available to the survivor. Should we both perish our children would be the benefactors with having to endure probate.

I wonder how many contractors have protected their assets in the case of a lawsuit or death. I doubt that many have and believe the reason is that many contractors never think about it, I did not until a few weeks ago. I have had the privilege of working for two separate contractors who unbeknown to me have protected their assets, at the time that I heard about their methods I remember thinking "how smart", but never did anything about it for myself until two weeks ago. It is not too late for you and does not need to cost an arm and a leg.

Any input to these ideas are more then welcome.

Thank you for reading ours.