7:15 PM – 9:00 PM Subject To – Land Trusts – Hiding Your Ownership of Properties from Public Records
Location
Lexington Town Hall (Elias Mack Room downstairs) 111 Maiden Lane Lexington, SC 29072
Creative Real Estate Investing in South Carolina
WHAT YOU WILL LEARN FROM THE MAIN PRESENTATION
This meeting features an expert at asset protection, Randy Hughes, who will show us how to hide our assets from predators and scammers who will try to take what we have if they know we have it. Randy’s specialty is showing us how we can hide our ownership of real estate from those who want to try to sue us and take it away.
We live in a time when some people think it’s easier to file lawsuits to get our real estate, or large chunks of money, from us rather than figure out ways to buy it themselves. Ever hear of disgruntled tenants who are unhappy with their landlords or people who purposely get into car accidents then call ambulance-chasing attorneys to take their case?
If you don’t know how to hide your assets, all an attorney usually has to do is go to the public records, search for your name, then see everything you own and file a lawsuit to go after your possessions. See above picture of Orangeburg County, SC public records search for proof of how easy it is to find what real estate is owned by the Jennings family.
True Case Study (owner’s name changed for privacy purposes)
A guy I know who is a landlord in Aiken, SC, let’s call him George, got into a car accident. The driver of the other car knew that George owned some rental houses. George owned over 200 rental houses at the time. The supposedly injured driver tried to hire one of those ambulance-chasing attorneys, i.e., a contingency-fee attorney who only gets paid if he and his client are awarded money. Since George’s properties were held in his own name, it was easy for any attorney to search the public records in Aiken County and find that George owned a lot of real estate and had assets to pay for any pain and suffering experienced by the supposedly injured driver.
It was easy to find a contingency-fee lawyer to take his case because it was easy to see that George had some money, so the supposedly injured driver had his attorney contact George and tell him something like this, “George, I saw in the public records that you own a lot of real estate. Tell you what, we could file a lawsuit and take this to court to go after all your properties, or you can pay my client $50,000 and we’ll settle quickly without going to court and drop this case.”
Of course, George chose to settle quickly for the much lesser amount of $50,000 rather than have to hire his own expensive lawyer to defend himself and risk losing a couple million dollars’ worth of real estate to this driver and the driver’s attorney. If George had properly concealed his ownership of all his real estate with land trusts, the driver of the other car that George hit wouldn’t have been able to get an attorney to take his case to threaten George with a lawsuit since no attorney wants to spend time on a client who most likely can’t pay his legal bills.
Land trusts are free or cheap to form and they are flow-through entities on your tax returns so there is no need to file separate tax returns for each land trust. There’s no reason to NOT have your properties in land trusts. Our meeting speaker, Randy Hughes, will show us how to use paperwork to put our real estate into land trusts to avoid losing money like what happened to my buddy, George.
Our main speaker, Randy Hughes, has been investing in real estate for over 50 years. He teaches real estate investment courses throughout the United States. He has written Privacy and Asset Protection books and home study courses. He has written extensively for local and national real estate publications. He has been an expert witness in the California and Illinois court systems on Land Trust issues.
Randy has taught real estate classes at the University of Illinois, Parkland College, and Elgin Community College. Randy has been a licensed Continuing Education Instructor for the Illinois REALTORS® for 25 years. He has been speaking to real estate investment groups all over the United States since 2000. He is an Expert Author for EzineArticles.com and REIClub.com He is a faculty member for Lorman Education Services in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. Randy is also a Faculty Advisor for Realestatemogul.com.
Don’t miss this meeting if you’d like to learn how to play “hide and seek” with real estate and keep predators, scammers, and ambulance chasers from taking your hard-earned properties away from you. We look forward to seeing you there!
