Blake Harris on What Successful People Do Before Trouble Hits

Welcome to Perceived Reality.

I'm your host Nadia Atual.

Did you know that being sued is actually now a batch of success, but you can protect yourself against it, and my next guest is making it happen.

Welcome to the show, Blake Harris.

Nadia, thanks for having me on the show.

Great to be here today.

Like, I find it so fascinating what you're doing.

You really carved out a very interesting niche, as I just said.

Lawsuits are usually a sign that you are doing well, you are successful, you're relevant.

It was actually an interesting book written by one of the greatest TV producers in Hollywood, also a talent manager, and he wrote a book with the title Where Did I Go Right?

You're nobody in Hollywood till Somebody Wants You Dead.

So I guess you know making enemies is part of being successful and people wanting a piece of the pie, same thing.

So tell me about your business and why did you choose it?

Well, Nadia, you're absolutely correct.

In America, a lawsuit is a bad success.

If you're successful enough in the States you can expect to be sued at some point.

There are millions of lawsuits filed every single year.

Billions of dollars are ordered to be paid out in judgments every few days.

The good news though is by being proactive you can rearrange your financial affairs so in the event that a lawsuit does come your way, you're still able to hold on to your wealth.

How do you go about that?

Well, comes the magic, the secret sauce.

All right, so here's the magic.

While there's multiple different ways of protecting your assets, there's one strategy that stands out above the others as the best, and that is creating an offshore asset protection trust.

With an offshore trust, you can still direct how your money is invested.

You can request distributions and take money out of the trust any time you want, but if you ever get sued or you go through a divorce, the assets in the trust can remain protected.

And the beautiful thing, it's a It's perfectly legal, and many people just don't know that this exists.

Yes, it's perfectly legal.

Offshore trusts have been around since the 1980s.

Well, they've been around longer than that under certain circumstances, but since the 1980s, the Cook Islands has allowed for the use of a self-settled asset protection trust.

You can also set up a self-settled trust here in the United States.

However, the protection, the protection you get from a self-settled domestic trust is much weaker than the protection you get with an offshore trust.

So if you want real protection, you set it up.

Offshore, yes, it is completely legal.

It is also ethical too.

This idea that being weak and unprotected is honorable or righteous is something I completely disagree with.

If you want to do the honorable thing, you take action and you protect your money.

Agree fully.

What assets can be protected?

So pretty much any assets can be protected.

Some assets are protected under homestead protection or IRA protection.

So your retirement account, your home, that It comes with a certain level of protection, and it depends on what state you live in, but for everything else, any investment account, any cryptocurrency, any non-qualified retirement, any second homes, all those remain unprotected unless you put them into some type of asset protection trust.

With an asset protection trust, as I mentioned, anything that you want to invest in, you can invest in now through the trust structure, but you'll be able to do that with the peace of mind that comes along with knowing that your assets are fully secured.

You are number one in your field.

Accordingly, I've had some people say that.

I've heard people say that.

Yeah, so I'm glad I'm speaking with the leader here of this interesting.

Industry and who is your typical client?

Is it really broad spectrum cross country?

So Nadi, the biggest misconception in the asset protection world is asset protection is just for the super wealthy, and this is very far from true.

If you've got two individuals, one is worth $2 million the other is worth $200 million and both are hit with a $5 million judgment.

The individual worth $200 million is not going to have any real effect on their standard of living.

Now, the individual who's only worth $2 million they need to be able.

Negotiate.

They need to be able to settle this case, and they are the ones who benefit the most from setting up an asset protection trust.

The majority of our clients have a net worth of somewhere between about 1 and $10 million in assets, and the majority of people who are being sued have under $2 million in assets.

So it does not necessarily take a huge level of wealth to justify setting up an offshore trust.

I remember when I came from Europe to America very quickly I understood why America was called lawsuit nation.

It's basically possible to just sue somebody because they just.

It's easy.

Number one, attorneys out there are advertising, which is not allowed in a lot of the world.

You can bring a case on a contingency fee, which means you don't have to put any money up front.

You can amend your case.

You can start a case and dig into someone's financial affairs, then determine the reason you want to sue them.

And what's this like for a defendant?

Well, if you're busy running a business, You're not going to want to take the time to defend a case.

You're not going to want to spend all this money responding to discovery and paying attorneys hourly, even if it's a nonsense case.

What ends up happening is a lot of defendants will end up just paying a settlement, and what this is is basically legal extortion.

I don't want this to happen to me.

I don't want this to happen to my clients, and the way to do that is be proactive with your planning.

You've got to be proactive because if you're The being targeted in a lawsuit, it's too late, so you need to use this like a vaccine in a sense and apply this protective layer early on.

Very much so.

An ounce of prevention is worth £1 of the cure, and this is certainly true when it comes to acid protection planning.

For your planning to be most effective, you want to do it before the threat of any litigation arises.

That will give you the best results.

Like, I think your service is absolutely necessary.

For so many people, and I'm glad that you are my guest today because otherwise I would not have known about this.

And I think so many of our viewers feel the same way, and I hope you're coming again.

Well, Nadia, it was great being here today.

I hope that I'd helped spread the message about the importance of being proactive about protecting your assets and doing it the right way with a trust that's registered offshore that way no US court can break it.

Thanks so much for having me, Nadia.

Thank you for coming.

This was another episode of Perceived Reality.

Join us again next time.