What 1,000 Bankruptcy Cases Taught Me About Protecting Wealth

Mark Pierce 0:00 Yes, the first thing I learned in terms of structuring was that you should have a Wyoming LLC domicile in Wyoming to protect your family business. So if you just go out, open up a checkbook and start doing business and put everything in your personal name, good luck to you. Something's going to happen at some point in time that's going to undercut you. My thing is to plan for the worst, hope for the best, but plan for the worst.

Maggie Pierce 0:23 This is Keep What You Built, the show where we go in depth on the wealth preservation strategies nobody talks about publicly. Every week I sit down with my dad, attorney Mark Pierce, to break down complex asset protection and wealth building strategies in plain English. Mark administered over 1,000 cases as a federal bankruptcy trustee. If you want to learn the most common mistakes that lead to bankruptcy and how to avoid making them yourself, we are recording this episode for you. Hello, Mark. How are you today?

Mark Pierce 0:51 I'm well, Maggie, how are you?

Maggie Pierce 0:53 I am doing just fine.

Mark Pierce 0:55 All right.

Maggie Pierce 0:56 Yes. So jumping right into it, uh, can you walk me through your career up to becoming a bankruptcy trustee and how you got into that line of work?

Mark Pierce 1:06 I'd be delighted. Um, you know, after I graduated from high school, I went to college and uh spent four years there, got a degree in statistics and a degree in uh accounting. After that, I took the CPA examination and passed it on the first sitting, which that year was one of I think three percent uh that did that. You can condition out if you passed two or more of the four sections at the time, you got to keep those sections and keep testing the rest. I passed all four. I joined a large accountancy firm, went through their indoctrination program or whatever it was they called it, training program. And about 30 minutes into my first job, after having gone through their training program, uh which was specific to their particular uh organization, I decided I did not want to be an accountant. So I called a friend of mine up in Houston, Texas. He offered me a job on an offshore drilling rig, and that was the end of my accounting career. So I was an accountant for about 30 minutes, maybe less. Anyway, I ended up working in the Gulf Shore and then off the coast of California. I ran materials down to Columbia because they were drilling in the Caribbean basin as well. And I was scheduled to begin going overseas uh as a management trainee within that organization when I hurt my back and couldn't complete the program. As a result of that, I decided to go to law school and I picked the University of Colorado, and for one reason, one reason only, I didn't know that much about law. I had no mentorship at all. I just liked the look of the campus. I thought it was just so beautiful. And I thought, you know, if there's someplace that looked like a law school, that was it. So I enrolled at the University of Colorado, was accepted, and spent three years there. I focused primarily on uh a number of courses. You get a broad-based education, but I focused primarily on business courses, and I focused on tax courses. I was uh an intern, if you will, or a research assistant for Norton Steuben. Norton was a tax professor there who wrote volumes about things concerning the uh tax court, things concerning taxes, and things concerning businesses regarding taxes. Uh I really enjoyed it. And as a result of that, I co-authored with him an article in the 1983 Colorado Law Journal called uh the tax aspects at the tax aspects of convertible participating preferred mortgages, which came out on the day that the real estate market collapsed, and I think may have been read by one or two people, which taught me a very crucial lesson. Timing is everything. So I got a job I got a job offer from a large firm and uh joined that firm in 1983, spent several years with them, um, and had an offer to leave that firm and go to another large firm with the partner who I was working under, and began thinking that maybe there was more to life than being an attorney in a large law firm. We were billing approximately 2,400 hours a year, and I didn't have any time to myself. And I was dictated to in large part by what I should be doing, what I ought to be doing, uh, where I ought to be going, and all the aughts that she should be doing at the end of the day, and I wasn't really an otter. So I decided I was quitting, I'd go out and join a small firm of small practice, which is what I did. Uh the day that I got out, the economy, more or less, and I'm kind of exaggerating, but right after I got out, the economy in Colorado, which was where I was at the time, collapsed. And uh if you took a look at uh the the what they call the Colts states, Colorado, Oklahoma, Louisiana, and Texas, there was not one bank that existed in 1985 that existed in those states. In 1992, they all collapsed. And uh it was a real drain on the American economy, the oil and gas industry, and the minerals industries in the Western states collapsed as well. And the result of that was that uh mergers and acquisitions work, which I was principally involved in at the time, collapsed. So I looked around and a friend of mine had become a trustee at the uh for the state of Colorado in the bankruptcy court there. And he said, Mark, you know, you ought to consider becoming a liquidation trustee. I said, Well, that sounded pretty good to me since I didn't have I needed to fill up my rent coffer somehow. And so I went to work as a bankruptcy trustee. Now I had taken a bankruptcy course in college, in law school, and had uh won the book award in that course under a gentleman by the name of uh Clint Hines. And uh the book award basically says I got the highest grade. So I got the highest grade in bankruptcy. So I had I had all that experience behind me, which turned out to be not near enough. So I threw myself into it and uh administered over the course of about three to five years about 1,000 to 1,500 bankruptcy cases and involving the litigation, that sort of thing. And then um I quit doing that because I started getting a bankruptcy practice of my own and began representing some of the banks that came in. Um and I'd represented the trustee, penal trustee, a couple times in cases in front of the bankruptcy court as well. So I began looking at people and the way that they held their assets and what worked in terms of preserving assets so they could get a fresh start. The idea behind the bankruptcy code in the United States, as enshrined in the U.S. Constitution, is that you should get a fresh start, which is a distinct difference between the way we are and the way the English are. And so I took that as a given. But over the years, the banking industry, the credit card industry, all these people that have an have an interest in being creditors in a bankruptcy proceeding, have really mitigated that. So that uh you'd be lucky if you have enough money to buy your next sandwich the day you get out of bankruptcy court most of the time. The exemption provisions for houses and pension funds and that are really scaled back. So if you want to live in a trader house out on the prairie somewhere, so you have minimal rent and uh $20,000 or less uh mobile home, you'll be just fine. Your Social Security will cover you for $3,000 a month and you can live out the rest of your days. That's what your bankruptcy court will provide you because there are no real creditor protections in state statutes. Well, beginning in about the early 1990s, and I can say this went over from the 1980s, you began coming across states such as Wyoming, which is where I grew up, where I was from. The state of Wyoming said we're going to put together limited liability companies that allow people to put their business into these LLCs, fall, small, family-owned business into these LLCs, and we'll allow these family members to take membership interests. But if there's a liability of one of those membership interest holders, they can't get into that LLC and disrupt a family business. And vice versa. So Wyoming developed a very, very strong inside-outside creditor protection statutes and their LLC statutes, which I thought was very interesting and much needed. This was in the 1980s.

Maggie Pierce 8:28 What did the job as a trustee actually entail day to day? What were you doing? What were the types of cases you saw?

Mark Pierce 8:35 Typically, what I saw were small business cases and individual creditor or individual debtor cases. And so my job was to take a look at the assets, take a look at the liabilities, and see whether or not there was anything that resulted in a bankruptcy estate, meaning, was there anything more than the creditor claims against those assets that could be recognized by the estate for the general creditors? And typically that was no. The banks that had loaned money against houses and that sort of thing were undersecured, so they got the house. So typically everything was taken by those preferred creditors over a period of time and very little was left for those individual stakeholders. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

Maggie Pierce 9:20 And then what was the situation when you started representing clients in your own firm as well?

Mark Pierce 9:26 When I began representing debtors who declared bankruptcy, the first thing that I would do was look for assets that I could strengthen in terms of their resistance to creditor claims, like pension funds, IRA, spousal immunities, these sorts of things. And I would begin allocating assets amongst those assets over a period of time to get beyond the statute of limitations for those transfers so that when they went to bankruptcy court, there would not be an estate, but they'd have enough left in their estate to survive. Now there's no one making a killing from what I was doing. It was simply allow them a fresh start, which the Constitution guaranteed. Secured creditors and banks don't like that idea. They think that you should be able to wring every last cent out of people, cast them to the side, and allow them to go on.

Maggie Pierce 10:16 So when you were doing that type of work, I know that the law has changed a lot in terms of the protective structures that are available to people now. Uh, but back then, is there anything you learned about how to set up your assets or structure them that can be applied today as well?

Mark Pierce 10:33 Yes, the first thing I learned uh in terms of structuring was that you should have a Wyoming LLC domicile in Wyoming to protect your family business, because that'll allow you to protect your family business. Beyond that, the best way to do it is to have a house in uh Florida, which has a $5 million exemption in the next $10 million these days. Next spect's thing is a pension fund. But the difficulty is with the pension fund is the banks have found ways into those pension funds, and Congress hasn't fought back to strengthen those uh or to preserve those assets. Let me make one thing really clear. The exemptions provided by bankruptcy are largely provided by the state where you are. So, for instance, if you're in Wyoming, you get Wyoming's homestead exemption, which I believe is around $20,000 to $40,000. What kind of a homestead exemption is that? Now you can double it if you're married, so it's $40 to 80, depending upon the residence that you have. What can you get for that? Can you get a fresh start out of that? No. And then if you have now, Wyoming does do a pretty good job on preserving IRAs and pension funds and that sort of thing, but a lot of other states don't. So if you're relying on a state to help you get a fresh start using the bankruptcy procedures, you're barking up the wrong tree.

Maggie Pierce 11:42 Do you have an idea of why that is? Is that because of some sort of lobbying with banks as well, or why are there so so few protections for people?

Mark Pierce 11:53 Banks control the bankruptcy industry. Banks, Philip, they're not allowed in to take everything they can from individual debtors that the banks are impinged or infringed or corrupted as a result of that and will go broke. They offer no statistics to back that up. In fact, when it comes down to bankruptcy fraud and marshalling assets, banks have yet to provide one iota, one line of statistics to back up their claims that they're being hurt by those procedures. Not one.

Maggie Pierce 12:22 I see. So it sounds like it is really up to people to put the things instead of relying on the government's uh built-in systems.

Mark Pierce 12:34 Exactly right. And one of the protections that has come out in recent years are domestic asset protection trusts. And so you you establish these asset protection trusts under state law, they provide you with the tax protection you wish you had in bankruptcy.

Maggie Pierce 12:51 Okay. Starting with the LLC, because we were talking about that earlier, because I'm thinking about how to structure it for people watching who are looking to start the process of protecting themselves against uh potential issues that they might face in the future. You've said that the first step is an LLC, particularly in Wyoming. Can you talk more about that? Why Wyoming, why a close LLC, what considerations people should make?

Mark Pierce 13:18 It's interesting because Wyoming was the first state to create limited liability companies. They did that back in the 1980s. I know the gentleman who's behind it. I went to college with him. And I think it's one of the most foresighted individuals that I've ever met in terms of that particular issue with the LLC. And don't tell him I told you that. But at the end of the day, what you're concerned about is if there's a liability within the LLC, the bankruptcy, the business has gone bankrupt. You don't want them getting out to the membership interest holders. You know, you bifurcate that liability. If you've got a liability with the LLC, it stays there. You can't give it out to the membership interest holders to collect it. And Wyoming has a closed limited liability company. Essentially means about the only thing that you can't do, you don't have to have annual minutes, you don't have to approve loans, you don't have to go through any of the normal affirmative aspects of a corporation or of a regular LLC in a number of other states. All you have to avoid doing in Wyoming is just don't commingle funds, your personal funds with the LLC funds. Anything more than that, if your business goes broke in the LLC, they can't get out to you as a membership interest holder. And vice versa, if you have a problem with a creditor and they attach your LLC interest, that creditor can't get into that membership, can't get into that limited liability company because a limited liability company is only obligated to pay that creditor what it distributes to you. So you can't make a direct distribution to that membership interest holder. You have to make it to the creditor. Well, guess what happens? You get a judgment against you, they try to attach that membership interest, they can't take it, they can't sell it. All they can do is notify the LLC that any distribution that comes out of the LC goes to that creditor. So what do you do? You create phantom income and you send a 1099 to that creditor. Says, you had 100,000 worth of income. And they says, yes, but where's the cash? We need to pay the tax. You say, Oh, it's phantom income. We just recognized it in the LLC, but you still owe it to the IRS. Good luck to you. And now all of a sudden the bank has a three, uh, uh a $30,000 tax liability that they can't cover out of the assets from the from the LLC. So there are ways to smoke them out, but it's an absolutely brilliant way to go about it. So that allows you to get into business without sinking yourself. Problem is, as an individual membership interest holder, you end up guaranteeing bank debt of anything that that business incurs to a bank. So the the goal is at some point in time, don't go to a bank. Go to individuals who will lend money to the LLC on the strength of the business without asking for a guarantee from you. Good luck finding it, but you know, it's worthwhile trying.

Maggie Pierce 15:54 Okay, so it sounds like close LLC in Wyoming, avoid bank loans, don't commingle funds. Uh is that.

Mark Pierce 16:02 That's a good way to start. Get a Wyoming LLC. You know, and there are a lot of states that do not recognize single member LLCs. One of them is Florida. Florida recently came up with the idea that they were going to, they had discovered the series LLC. How do you discover something that's been in existence for 40 years? You know, slap DeSantis on the back. Boy, you're a real winner down there. You discover something that's been in existence for 40 years. In the mutual fund industry out of Delaware, Wyoming Incorporated, about what was it, about 15 years ago. These things have been out there. They're gaining acceptance, they make ease of transferability easier, opening accounts, that sort of thing. But now Florida's discovered it. Well, guess what? Florida doesn't record recognize single member LLCs. But they have serious LLCs. How are they going to square that up? Be interesting to see how they do it.

Maggie Pierce 16:54 Okay, um, on that, uh, since a lot of states don't recognize it, I think a lot of people will be wondering whether they're allowed to form an LLC in Wyoming if they don't reside there. And if so, if they reside in another state, how does that state work with recognizing a Wyoming single-member LLC?

Mark Pierce 17:14 Well, the other state will have to recognize the efficacy of Wyoming laws under the U.S. Constitution. It's called the Full Faith and Credit Act. Now, as to the individual properties that are owned by that LLC, if you have a Wyoming LLC that owns real estate in Georgia, Georgia law is going to apply as to that real estate. You won't be able to protect it under Wyoming law. But if you have cash and movables like cash, securities, intellectual property, that and you have it domiciled in Wyoming under a Wyoming address, Georgia has no jurisdiction over that. Wyoming does, and Wyoming isn't going to allow it to happen. So as a practical matter, if you have tangible assets, Wyoming law is not going to protect you outside of Wyoming. If you have intangible assets and you domicile in Wyoming, you've got the protection of Wyoming law.

Maggie Pierce 17:59 So what would you recommend for people who do have tangible assets in a certain state then?

Mark Pierce 18:04 Well, they're uh equity stripping, and this is what I've seen a lot. We represented uh a lender, if you will, who was a real estate investor and developer in Colorado and Denver, and he had entered into a business deal with a restaurateur who had been a very successful restauranteur, and by all by all indications, was continuing to be a successful restaurateur, but then COVID hit. So they developed this restaurant, put all this money into it, gave all these concessions, made it a flagship of a real estate uh development, and then COVID hit and the guy closed shop. Now he had given guarantees and these sorts of things. But at the end of the day, we went out and we tried to find the guy's assets, something called a skip trace, trying to find where his name showed up. His name didn't show up anywhere. So he had gotten into an asset protection trust. He had been land trust to rat hole his his real estate. He had moved all of his money out of state so you couldn't find it. Or if you did find it, another state's laws would apply. And the result of that was the client that we had in the real estate development business said, I need one of those asset protection trusts. So we did an asset protection trust for him. Now he still maintains all of his real estate in and around Denver, but anything outside of Denver, he's got essentially rat hold in Wyoming.

Maggie Pierce 19:25 Okay, so I think that's a pretty natural segue into talking more about asset protection trusts. And I think it makes sense to start first with what is an asset protection trust.

Mark Pierce 19:35 An asset protection trust is what they call a self-settled trust, meaning you are the individual who establishes a trust and you're a beneficiary of the trust. Under the common law and most states' laws, a self-settled trust is not recognized. So you need a statute. The first statute in the United States, I believe, was Alaska. The next couple statutes were Nevada, Wyoming, Delaware, as far as I know. And what it allows you to do is it allows you to set up a trust for the benefit of your family to maintain the management aspects of the trust through the trustee, through an independent entity, in a statutory mechanism that allows you to put wealth into that trust and keep that wealth away from creditors that you may have sometime into the future. Now the question is if you take an asset and you transfer it into your asset protection trust, how long do the creditors have under the Uniform Fraudulent Transfer or Uniform Voidable Preferences Act to go after those assets? In Wyoming, with the notice provisions that we have, it's four months. So after four months, if you follow those provisions, you're golden. They can't get into that trust. So in other states, it's two years and four years. It's a long period of time. The additional thing that Wyoming has that a lot of other states don't have is that if you get a judgment, say in Florida, and you come trotting into Wyoming to enforce that judgment, Wyoming will recognize that judgment under the full Fraith and Credit Clause of the Constitution. However, it doesn't apply to the exemptive provisions available in Wyoming for those assets. So when you get to a Wyoming court, they're going to look at you and say, you're attempting to pull back assets that are in an asset protection trust. Yes, I am. Okay, well, we have a next mechanism for that. It's called a chancery court. You have to go to the chancery court and file there. So the creditor goes to the chancery court and files there. Those records are automatically sealed. No one gets a copy of those records. So you're going to have a difficult time finding how things are going for debtors and creditors in Wyoming because those records are sealed. You then go in front of a chancery court judge who is very adept and very knowledgeable about the workings of trusts, transfers into trusts, and all aspects of the administration of that trust. And you're going to be having a critical talk between two attorneys and a judge, which I find it to be kind of enlightening because when I litigated bankruptcy cases, you didn't you knew the judge. The judge knew you. So you had to get down to what it was that your case was actually about. And it happened pretty quickly. And I used to go against inexperienced counsel in a bankruptcy court, and I didn't have to emasculate them. The judge would. It was just the most interesting thing. And a kid that was in my uh law school graduating class from a generational family of lawyers in Denver with a high-ranking firm came in in front of a judge and she slayed him because he just assumed that something was going to happen that didn't happen. What ended up happening is the judge got down to the facts because she had 30 cases behind us, right? She got right down to the facts, ruled in my favor twice, and that bank came over to me for representation after we were done. So that's what ends up happening. So you go into the chancery court, the judge knows you, the judge will respect you, you respect the judge, you do not lie to that judge. You present the facts that are pertinent to the case at issue, and you know what those facts and cases are, and so does the judge. So that litigation is pretty straightforward, and there's a mandate to conclude that litigation within nine months, and that judge is meeting that mandate. So you get these out-of-state lawyers who come in with this, oh my God, the house is burning attitude. These people establish an asset protection trust. It's hurting the creditors of my state. This should never have happened. And the judge sticks down and says, What are the facts? Burns the way through the facts, and you get a judgment. Now you may win or you may lose, but it's a good judgment. That's the benefit of having that asset protection trust. So if you have movables domiciled in the state of Wyoming, the exemption provisions of Wyoming apply. You established the trust, you sent the notices out, the statute of limitations pass. Why are you here? Is there fraud involved? And I've never met a creditor who wasn't defrauded. The problem is you have to prove fraud with particularity, and generally you can't do that. So when they bring up these fraud claims all the time, they have to have very specific evidence of that, otherwise, they get kicked out of court right away. So the benefit of the Wyoming is that four-month statute of limitations, the chancery court, a nine-month cycle getting through the chancery court, and very beneficial laws as to asset protection trusts and the transfers that go into them.

Maggie Pierce 24:26 Some people, when they're looking into asset protection trusts, are worried that it is not going to a trust in Wyoming isn't going to work for them if they are residents of a state like California or Florida. Can you speak to that a little bit?

Mark Pierce 24:39 Yes, I can. There's a very particular case in California where an individual who had was a beneficiary of a trust who had been established by her father. He was a wildcatter from Texas, I think, somehow ended up in California, had a lot of money, gave his daughter a bunch of money, put into trust. She got married, they had kids, they got divorced, he ended up with the kids. Apparently wasn't able to pay child support other than through this trust. So her husband, ex-husband, through an attorney, goes to the domestic relations court and sues her to get into that trust. Well, they took the trust in California by a mechanism called decanting or porting and took it to South Dakota. Now, they could have taken it to Wyoming, but they elected to go to South Dakota. The husband then follows the assets to South Dakota because they're domiciled in South Dakota and sues to get into that trust. And South Dakota, in a case that I just laid out for full faith and credit just a moment ago, said, yes, we recognize that judgment, but as to the assets that you can attach, you go to South Dakota law. So at the end of the day, you have child support obligations in California or South Dakota, they're not enforceable against this kind of trust, and threw them out. So there you go. So movable assets, you'll be able to protect them. If you had real estate in California, I don't think the trust is gonna allow or the courts gonna allow that to happen. I can give you a very specific example of a client of mine here recently. He and his wife and their three adult kids came into my office through Zoom. So he's he's based out of New Jersey, right? New Jersey doesn't recognize asset protection trusts. So he and his wife and the three kids established an asset protection trust in Wyoming. They domiciled the cash, they domiciled the stock accounts, they domiciled all the movables in Wyoming. He had a professional practice in New Jersey. So that that couldn't be a part of the trust because professional practices have to be owned by doctors. So they came in and she sued for divorce. And the judge on that said, now we may not recognize an asset protection trust in New Jersey as against creditors outside that trust, but it's a contract. It was a contract between you, your wife, and your three adult children that says this is how you're going to keep these family businesses going, this is how they're going to be conducted, and this is how the distributions are going to be made. She wanted to take half of the trust. The judge said, but you're only one member of this trust and there's five people. Why are you looking for half? Well, she couldn't explain it. She thought she was entitled to half because her divorce attorney said the judge said, No, you entered into a contract. That's a that contract is enforceable against you, and you've asked for things that you cannot have. If you go to Wyoming to attempt to enforce that contract, there's a non-dispute clause in Wyoming that says you probably forfeited your interest in the trust. Did your attorneys explain that to you? And that's when we got a pretty quick settlement on that divorce. And you know, to be honest with you, she's now still a beneficiary of this family trust. She gets her distributions on the family trust, and I think she's going to do very well. But she'll do well as a part of the family business.

Maggie Pierce 27:58 How does bankruptcy work with the trust? Because obviously, if you're a beneficiary of a trust, you have access to certain assets. So what would you say? I guess how how would you recommend that people who are doing really well now avoid ending up in bankruptcy court or if you have any advice to that?

Mark Pierce 28:19 I know some of it's out of people's control, but you know, you know, things are things are never as good as or as bad as they seem. Unless you end up in bankruptcy and then they are. And one of the difficulties that I've seen, having come from the oil and gas industry in Wyoming and Montana, my family's been in that business since the late 1800s in Pennsylvania, is that there's just a roller coaster ride on making and losing money. And I think that's a lot like what we experienced in the United States. We had the stock market collapse in the 1980s, I think 89 is what it was. We had the financial services collapse, the banking collapse in the cold states. What was that? 1980s, 1990s. We had uh we had COVID, we had the financial collapse of 2008. You just have, and we have a tendency to forget about them because people are making money, everything's great until they aren't. And then you have to figure out face up to the cold realities of life. How do you preserve? How do you move on as a family? How do you allow yourself enough of a stake to get back into the game, right? Get back into a business, find something to do, because you know, these real estate bubbles come and they go. And uh, you know, I just looked at some of the pricing that goes on with the real estate now and think, how do people afford that? And the answer is they don't. What is the statistic right now? 49% of kids coming out of college live with their parents under the age of 30, live with their parents. Why, you know, what are you gonna do? Where are we gonna go with that? You know, a lot of things that need to be addressed with it. But if you're not planning for a downside, then you're not protecting yourself. And there are a lot of mechanisms available through statutes in the state where you reside and outside the state where you reside that allow you to do that. One of those is the structuring of assets into exempt assets. Another of those is the structuring into asset protection trusts. Another of that, and part of an asset protection trust, is establishing LLCs either as a part of your family business or as a part of your family business under the structure of an asset protection trust. And a lot of times what people do is they have an LLC that's producing a large amount of money. They need to move it over up into a holding LLC and then out to other LLCs to try other business endeavors. So you don't put all your eggs in one basket. Something that's very simple. Holding company concept with underlying LLCs engaged in a variety of business, very simple concept. Standard Oil of Ohio, incorporate from the 1800s. You know, the what was it, the trading companies that came out of England that had a limited liability did that. So those things are available to you. So if you just go out, open up a checkbook and start doing business and put everything in your personal name, good luck to you. Something's going to happen at some point in time that's going to undercut you. If it doesn't, that's fantastic. You are a very lucky individual. But I've never been that lucky. So my thing is to plan for the worst, hope for the best, but plan for the worst. Be in a position to get back into the game and to survive as a human being, as a family, as a business, moving forward into the future. And bankruptcy helped me to see that crystal clearly. I never met anybody who went into bankruptcies that didn't say, man, I wish I had approached this a lot differently. When it was good, I should have taken some money off the table instead of believing that it was just heading for the stratospheres and that I had somehow latched onto something, or my family had somehow latched onto something that was going to finally allow us to evolve as to who we truly are. King and Queen of England, I guess. I don't know. But at the end of the day, you don't get to do that. There are too many things that will go against you. So hope for the best, plan for the worst.

Maggie Pierce 32:06 Okay, then if there's uh somebody listening who's successful, busy, and hasn't thought much yet about planning or isn't sure where to start, uh, what would you want them to take away from this conversation?

Mark Pierce 32:19 Yeah, I that's really easy. You know, when your kids are going to sleep tonight, go in and look in the eyes of your kids and say, what do I do if I start to lose everything? If what I've got, the sand underneath my feet begins to shift. How do I protect these kids? How do I protect my family? Go do that. Start with that. So be conservative. Do what you can do. Hide away some of the money. And I'm not talking about doing it illicitly. Put money where people can't get to it, including yourself. And develop a savings out of it. Don't spend everything you make. And then get a good attorney to help you to structure your business, to help you to structure your asset protection, and to provide a legacy for your family other than GR. Remember when dad had money.

Maggie Pierce 33:04 I think I meant more uh practical next steps. Like if somebody was like, okay, I I hear you, I'm uh I'm ready to take some money off the table, put it in a secure structure. How would they start the process of deciding whether an asset protection trust is right for them and getting the starting the process of getting that set up if it is?

Mark Pierce 33:27 I'd say one of my best referral sources are accountants. Because accountants know what you have and they know they've been up and down with the with their clients for a lot of years. Go to your excuse me, go to your go to your accountant, make that assessment on where your assets are, and then have your accountant recommend you to a good asset protection attorney, somebody with banking experience, right? Somebody with bankruptcy experience, and somebody with trust experience. And have that individual put together a legacy plan for you. That's it.

Maggie Pierce 34:09 Yeah, that makes sense. All right. Um, well, those were all of the questions I had. Is there anything else on your mind that you think is relevant to this that you didn't get to throughout the rest of the conversation?

Mark Pierce 34:23 Yeah, there was a great quote by Eric Clapton years ago, and Eric had a lot of ups and downs in his musical career. And I always liked his music, and he is a magnificent guitarist. But uh his his mother had said, and he took it to heart towards the end of his life, he says, you know, all of those people who you met on the way up, you're gonna meet a whole different cast of characters on the way down. And he meant that derogatorily because people that were there to be around you when you were successful, those people are not your long-term friends generally. And then the people who show up after the fact are basically leeches. So you have to be really, really careful. And I've had my own personal experiences in life where the people who were involved making money, doing great deals, didn't show up to help a lick when I could have used some help here and there. So my advice to you is get a good bankruptcy attorney or get a good estate planning attorney and get a great accountant. And when you look for those people, make sure they got some practice and litigation. Because I've run into a lot of trust and estate planning attorneys who have never seen the inside of a courtroom other than to provide for their own malpractice liabilities. And at the end of the day, I'm here to tell you that'll put a whole different hue on your estate and your legacy plan than you would have with someone who did not have that level and background of experience. And I can also tell you that as a statistician and a CPA, that helps a lot as well because we're really talking numbers and probabilities most of the time. So I find attorneys who get lost in the weeds and lead their clients all over the statutes and get way more cute than they need to get. My advice to them is hire a guy who knows how to put your stuff together and will sit in front of a judge and say, Judge, this rises to the level of the statute and it's exempt. And here's why. And listen, rather than going through 32 different statutes and all these mechanisms you did to move things around to get you to a position where no one understands it, including a judge who says, Okay, collapse it all, I'm taking it. So hire somebody who's honest and has been through the experience and then behave honestly and put yourself through the same experience. Yeah, give us a call, I'll give you the advice. You know, I can tell you, I can take a look at where your assets are, where they need to be, and how you need to get there. I can take a look at what your downside is. I'm gonna speak to you frankly about your family if you're in a family business, because I've been in family businesses for a long period of time, and I am really sympathetic by what goes on. And that that transition planning is critical in a business that involves a generational business, getting from one level to another. And I and I saw, here's one thing I saw that I really had a problem in uh the western states is that you would come into a family that had a ranch, they got up to you know eight to ten thousand acres, which in Wyoming sounds like a lot, but when you're only running you know 40 head of cattle over a thousand acres for an entire entire summer is probably not that much. But you know, they would come in and and I saw this in one case in particular where this guy had five kids, one of them was in prison, three of them had been very successful and gone off and had their own lives and wanted nothing to do with the ranch other than to come back, visit, say hello to their dad, and get on with their lives. And then you know who ended up running and inheriting most of the ranch? A kid who was ill-equipped. I mean, this kid couldn't find his way past a bar. And yeah, I'm talking about a bar with beer, not a practicing bar for lawyers. And he ends up running the running the business. So within about three or four years after the father and the mother die, that business is it's gone. And now the kids are coming back saying, Oh God, what do we do? And the answer is you're gonna sell it. You know, it's been in your family for four or five generations, but you need somebody to run it. And this guy is incapable of running it. And your father was incapable of telling him no. And I get that. It's hard to tell your it's hard to look your kids in the face and say you're not the one. You know, the other kids probably all knew it, but that kid didn't believe it. And so as a result of that, they lost a lot of money and ended up, you know, losing the ranch. They didn't lose it, they didn't lose money that much on the ranch, but they had to sell it. So that's my advice.

Maggie Pierce 38:57 All right. Uh thank you everyone for listening, and we'll see you next time.

Mark Pierce 39:01 Subscribe to make sure you do not miss the next episode.