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Providing Affordable On-Shore Tax Advantaged Asset Protection
Why Financial Fortress Associates?
I have had the privilege of working with the founder of Financial Fortress Associates for several years now. In this relatively short time I have learned more about estate planning and how to properly protect assets than in my prior 18 years in the insurance and investment field. As the Webmaster of FFA I have taken the opportunity to list some of the founders credentials and therefore also that of Financial Fortress Associates.
Even though he is not an attorney, the founder of FFA went to law school several years ago. He chose not to continue in the statutory arena for several reasons. Some of which will become apparent as you study this site.
He started in the off shore arena in 1986 and has specialized in the domestic arena now for several years. He has successfully withstood 7 separate challenges from various State Supreme Courts to cease helping others protect their assets through **Constitutional Pure Trusts and others means of asset protection. He continues to apply his vast knowledge and experience in helping his clients obtain maximum protection and tax benefits according to their specific needs. He is also sought by attorneys for his knowledge in the area of Constitutional Pure Trusts and often conducts training seminars for them as a result.
His desire to provide the best possible protection for his clients has lead him to spend literally thousands of dollars on a vast number of trust contracts offered by virtually every group out there in order to know the strengths and weaknesses of these various programs.
The founder of FFA also has had the privilege of studying the Internal Revenue Code under a gentleman who has researched tax law for almost 30 years and successfully argued tax law in several court settings. This particular individual oversees a membership estimated in the thousands in every state of the union. As a result of his studies the founder has qualified as a certified representative of this group. This is in addition to his own extensive study of the Internal Revenue Code, Code of Federal Regulations and related Supreme Courts cases. Staff and consultants to FFA number close to 20 persons and consist of CPA's, financial planners as well as attorneys.
His coming into the Pure Trust field from the statutory side in combination with his extensive knowledge of non statutory or Common Law gives the founder of FFA the unique understanding of the issues and concerns related to both sides.
Below is an excerpt from his book, which is available to our members in our private "members only" section. This excerpt will give you a little history of how the founder came into this field and why. I hope you will come away with a portion of the appreciation for his extensive knowledge and expertise that I have since working with this gentleman.
Thank you for considering Financial Fortress Associates .
The Webmaster
Excerpt from "The Book"
I was very fortunate in my early days as an estate planner to work with an attorney who had been a legislator for 16 years. He had retired from politics and was employed by an investment syndication to go after an organization that had bilked the investors out of almost a billion dollars. He worked at it for four years tracing the corporations, limited partnerships, trusts, offshore companies, and overseas corporations to their bank accounts to try to recover the monies. During those four years he had learned things that most people would not even think possible. He was only able to find $30,000,000 or about 3% of what had been taken. Of course that is the nasty side of asset protection. On the positive side, he had learned over 117 ways to protect assets. How to protect them even against the law!
Because of our working relationship, my group was able to bring as many as 100 clients a month to his offices to protect their estates. I was involved in each of the programs and was exposed to more scenarios in three months than most asset protection planners see in a lifetime. I was fascinated by it all and would awake at 2:00 am with a solution to a sticky problem and how to handle it. It was my cup of tea - legally beating the system.
The only problem was that the cost of creating these plans was never less than $25,000 and usually was more like $35 - $50,000, and the people always had to work through the lawyers and only the lawyers were permitted to have contact with the trustees, and administrators. This was an expensive way to do things, and required absolute and total faith in a lawyer. Sounds like an impossible situation to me.
The high initial cost and the tiers of people that needed to be paid in order to make these plans work got my investigative juices going. I knew that I wanted, but could not afford this kind of protection, nor would I want to pay the ongoing management fees, and if I could find an affordable way to do this then I too could take advantage of this high level of asset protection.
My initial asset protection strategies involved Living Trusts and Limited Partnerships. There exists over 80 years of solid case law behind these entities and they provided tax savings in addition to the asset protection. There wasn't any great amount of paperwork involved in maintaining them and there was the advantage that one didn't have to work through tiers of lawyers and trustees to get things done, and the ongoing costs were relatively small. The bad part was that the rules regarding trusts and limited partnerships were subject to change at the whim of the legislatures. I had also become tired of having to keep one person on the payroll just to make sure that the "business deposits" to the state tax, federal tax, unemployment tax, unemployment insurance (state and federal) and all the administrative garbage "they" had us going through. It was this that caused me to entertain the idea of taking a trip to sunny California several years ago to learn about a "Contract Trust". When I went to the seminar I learned a great deal about the relationship of the trust to the IRS Code and how there were certain tax advantages that existed using these organizations as the entity through which one could conduct business. It didn't take much to see that there were definite advantages to this type of organization, but I had to go to the law library to do my research work as the many lawyers and accountants with whom I worked, were totally unaware of the existence of these "trusts". It was while reading through an article about Massachusetts Trusts in the American Law Journal that I encountered the term "Pure Trust".
Once I took the Pure Trust "fork in the road" I knew that I'd never look back. In this book you will be able to learn about the myriad advantages of the Pure Trust Organization for privacy, asset protection, tax reduction or elimination, stability of business organization, and the ability to eliminate the terrorcrats interfering with private and business organizations."
** Some of the names also used for Pure Trusts are "Constitutional Pure Trust", "Pure Trust Organization", "PTO", "Common Law Trust", "Contract Trust", or "Constitutional Trust".
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