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Webinar Transcript: “Asset Protection and Personal Guaranties”

December 18, 2025

Webinar Transcript (12/18/2025): “Asset Protection and Personal Guaranties”

Host: Jonathan I. Shenkman, President & Chief Investment Officer of ParkBridge Wealth Management (Contact: jonathan@parkbridgewealth.com)

Presenter: K. Eli Akhavan, Esq. LL.M., Partner, Grant, Herrmann, Schwartz & Klinger LLP (Contaact:eakhavan@ghsklaw.com)

Jonathan Shenkman: Good morning, and welcome to the Park Bridge Wealth Management Fall Webinar Series. This program is entitled Asset Protection and Personal Guarantees. As always, my name is Jonathan Shankman, and I'm the President and Chief Investment Officer of Park Bridge Wealth Management. In that role, I serve in a fiduciary capacity to help my clients achieve their financial objectives. The goal of my programs is to bring professionals together to help them better serve their clients. This is done by educating attendees on the latest topics in wealth planning.

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Jonathan Shenkman: and by encouraging collaboration between a client's attorney, CPA, and financial advisor where appropriate. My practice focused on working with high net worth families, businesses, and not-for-profits. I manage individual investment portfolios, trust accounts, corporate retirement plans, and endowments.

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Jonathan Shenkman: to help my clients achieve their financial goals. In addition to the 20 or so events I run every year, I also do a fair amount of writing on the topics of investing and financial planning. You can read my work in a variety of periodicals, including Barron, CNBC, Forbes, Kiplinger, The Wall Street Journal, and Trust and Estates magazine, to name just a few. You can see all my work on my website at parkbridgewealth.com forward slash articles, or by following me on social media at Jonathan on Money.

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Jonathan Shenkman: Additionally, you could check out my weekly podcast, which is also called Jonathan on Money, and you can listen to that on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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Jonathan Shenkman: One last item, I published my first book, D is for Diversification, ABCs of Personal Finance, which can now be purchased on Amazon or at jonathanOnMoney.com, right in time for the holiday season. Your support and feedback is appreciated.

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Jonathan Shenkman: Today, we're privileged to hear from K. Eli Akaban from the firm Grant Herman, Schwartz & Klinger, based in New York. Eli's a partner specializing in tax and estate planning for high-net-worth U.S. and international clients. He advises on dynasty trusts, cross-border estate matters, foreign trust, asset protection structures, and private trust companies. Additionally, Eli advises U.S. clients who obtain alternative residencies and citizens in Europe, the Caribbean, and other jurisdictions as part

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Jonathan Shenkman: of their safe haven planning and investment migration. His clients include Fortune 500 executives, entrepreneurs, celebrities, and international families. A thought leader in his field, Eli teaches international taxation at St. John's University Law School, and is a frequently quoted… frequently quoted by major media outlets.

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Jonathan Shenkman: He lectures globally and co-chairs the ABA International Tax Planning Committee. And today, Eli is going to be speaking on asset protection and personal guarantees. And with that introduction, I'll now turn the program over to Eli.

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  1. Eli Akhavan: Thank you, Jonathan. Good morning, everybody. Thank you for attending today's seminar, webinar, I should say. Again, Jonathan, thank you for giving me this opportunity, and also congratulations on publication of your book.

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  1. Eli Akhavan: I'm sure my children will love to read it. There's certainly wonderful graphics, that I've seen,

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  1. Eli Akhavan: In the, in the press about it.

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  1. Eli Akhavan: So asset protection and personal guarantees. Personal guarantees, have… has been coming a lot, in my practice. Generally, when, the economy's not doing terribly well, and there are going to be defaults, the issue of personal guarantees comes up.

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  1. Eli Akhavan: And how people, when they first provided their personal guarantee, or the borrower first provided a personal guarantee to a institutional lender or private lender, now they're, you know, the rosy vision that they had for their investment.

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  1. Eli Akhavan: is not beginning to materialize, they're gonna start thinking, okay, I'm owing the bank money, my personal assets are at risk.

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  1. Eli Akhavan: what can I start doing about that if it's not too late? And…

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  1. Eli Akhavan: In today's webinar for the next, approximately 30 minutes, we're going to look at the general foundations of asset protection planning.

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  1. Eli Akhavan: Then we're going to look at specific features of personal guarantees, and then discuss some of the tools we have in our arsenal that we can help

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  1. Eli Akhavan: Our clients shield themselves, and their assets, their privately held assets, their personal assets,

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  1. Eli Akhavan: From a tax by lenders that, are the beneficiaries of the personal guarantees.

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  1. Eli Akhavan: So, in general, when it comes to asset protection, why do we have it? There's certainly been a…

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  1. Eli Akhavan: nice amount of proliferation litigation, throughout the country. The United States is one of the biggest havens for litigation. There's family and business creditors everybody needs to be careful from, and especially when you mix family and business together, you're gonna even have more of an issue.

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  1. Eli Akhavan: The piercing of the corporate veil, and we're gonna get a little bit into this with personal guarantees, often, investors, entrepreneurs, businessmen, and businesswomen, they are operating through a business entity.

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  1. Eli Akhavan: And if certain formalities are not followed, or if certain bad acts happen, judges,

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  1. Eli Akhavan: Are more prone to pierce that corporate veil and, treat the individual as not having the protections and the shield of a corporate entity.

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  1. Eli Akhavan: There are activist judges, there are judges that have very set philosophies about how things should work or should not work, and, they may stretch the limits and interpretation of a particular law or laws in order to make,

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  1. Eli Akhavan: their vision and their interpretation come to fruition. Insurance policies.

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  1. Eli Akhavan: So, many times a client comes to me and says, Eli, I already have a wonderful umbrella insurance protection plan in place. Why do I need the trust you're setting up? Why do I need the planning that you're going to recommend?

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  1. Eli Akhavan: And the answer is, number one, umbrella insurance policies have limits, and many times the,

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  1. Eli Akhavan: liability is way in the excess of those limits. Number two, there are exclusions. If, again, very similar to personal guarantees. If there are bad boy acts that are going to happen, I'm going to speak about that soon.

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  1. Eli Akhavan: their exclusions to the coverage from the insurance company. They're not always very much willing to pay out. I don't know if you've dealt with GEICO or other car insurance companies on a very simple fender bender, but they're not so prone to pay out there, or they make it difficult.

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  1. Eli Akhavan: They'll make it difficult, for umbrella insurance policies as well.

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  1. Eli Akhavan: And finally, asset protection is also not finally, but one of the other important reasons is to incentivize settlements. At the end of the day, negotiations, over money comes down to leverage.

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  1. Eli Akhavan: And leverage in asset protection is provided by incentivized installments. So if your assets are structured properly, if a

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  1. Eli Akhavan: If an aggressive creditor sees that they can't really go after the debtor, there's really not much they can get, there's not much water they can get from the stone, it incentivizes some sort of settlement plan with the creditor.

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  1. Eli Akhavan: Okay, let's jump into personal guarantees. So, generally, personal guarantees have come about because individuals, as we alluded to.

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  1. Eli Akhavan: they are doing business through entities. So they'll do business through limited liability companies, partnerships, and corporations. And the reason they do that, and this is very foundational, is because

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  1. Eli Akhavan: we want to segregate business operations and business asset risk from personal, and individual wealth. So we don't want that an individual's personal assets, their

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  1. Eli Akhavan: Cars, their personal residence, their jewelry, their other investment assets that has nothing to do with this particular business operation or investment.

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  1. Eli Akhavan: They want to segregate that risk, and that is definitely the wise choice, that's the way everybody should go into business. Segregate your assets between business assets and personal assets.

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  1. Eli Akhavan: However, that may leave a lender on the hook, right? If they're lending money to a business, and their recourse is non-recourse, they can't go after the borrower personally.

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  1. Eli Akhavan: then they are limited in what they can collect. So that's the basic math there. So, comes about a personal guarantee.

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  1. Eli Akhavan: So, a personal guarantee, the borrower is essentially saying, listen, I know my business assets may not be sufficient to cover the loan proceeds I'm asking for, and I know that this entity is really there to protect my personal assets and my personal wealth from liability.

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  1. Eli Akhavan: But I'll give a personal guarantee. If, in the event you're not able to collect, under certain conditions, I am willing to, personally guarantee the amount of this loan.

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  1. Eli Akhavan: Now, this… I'm simplifying it because this generally will happen with the borrower, who's investing.

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  1. Eli Akhavan: or whose entity's investing, sometimes it happens among partners. So, one partner in a real estate venture or in another venture is going to provide a personal guarantee for the other partners, and they'll provide cross guarantees. So, that's generally where these, the… the…

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  1. Eli Akhavan: Personal guarantee comes into, into fruition here.

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  1. Eli Akhavan: And now, obviously, when it comes to the borrower, they want to limit what the bank can go after. After all, they are

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  1. Eli Akhavan: operating through an entity, they do want to make sure, that their liability is not endless, and they can come after anything. They want to protect their personal residence, they want to protect their other assets. So.

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  1. Eli Akhavan: the borrower and the lender have come to this middle ground of what's called bad boy guarantees, or springing recourse guarantees. So, essentially, under these bad boy carve-outs and these springing recourse guarantees and provisions in these guarantees, the only time that

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  1. Eli Akhavan: The… the personal guarantee is… is enforceable is under certain circumstances, under certain triggering

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  1. Eli Akhavan: events. So these triggering events are generally for waste, fraud, misappropriation of funds, and as a very general one that I get this question a lot, is, oh.

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  1. Eli Akhavan: will the court, enforce these provisions? It's not fair, I shouldn't have owed this money, I got tricked by the bank, I… the courts don't care.

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  1. Eli Akhavan: The courts treat the borrowers as sophisticated individuals, as sophisticated parties, and if they're signed a personal guarantee, the court will generally treat it

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  1. Eli Akhavan: Absent some sort of fraudulent act by the bank or the lender, they will view these,

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  1. Eli Akhavan: They will view these provisions as fully enforceable.

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  1. Eli Akhavan: So let's go just through, some common carve-out provisions. So one type of typical trigger

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  1. Eli Akhavan: And this is where liability is limited to where there's actual damages or losses. Not the entire amount of the loan that the borrower or the guarantor is responsible for.

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  1. Eli Akhavan: But rather, it's just limited to the actual damage of the loss. So, that's, again, whether it's waste, misappropriation of funds, failure to pay taxes, environmental indemnities, we see these all the time in real estate transactions, fraud or misrepresentation in financial statements or loan documents. So, this is a big one.

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  1. Eli Akhavan: Many times, when someone's going out for, or is applying for the loan.

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  1. Eli Akhavan: or is applying for additional funds from a private or institutional lender, they have to provide personal financial statements, they have to provide other disclosures in these applications. And if there's fraud or misrepresentation there.

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  1. Eli Akhavan: Which is, you know, sometimes an individual or the borrower may not be

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  1. Eli Akhavan: be providing the most accurate information, there's going to be a trigger there for loss or actual damages to the bank as a trigger.

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  1. Eli Akhavan: Then you have the nuclear option, in these carve-outs, and that's when, there are triggers for the entire, pardon me, for the entire loan balance, that becomes the personal debt of the guarantor.

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  1. Eli Akhavan: So, this happens if there's bankruptcy of the borrower.

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  1. Eli Akhavan: or the guarantor. There's commingling of funds, for single-purpose entities, so meaning you have one entity, typically for real estate, it was set up to borrow money, and all of a sudden there's some commingling of funds between that entity and another unrelated entity, which is, inappropriate.

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  1. Eli Akhavan: Additional indebtedness.

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  1. Eli Akhavan: Banks don't like it, they want to be at the top level of the debt capital structure, and if they're… if they're moved around in that.

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  1. Eli Akhavan: That could trigger a carve-out. Prohibited transfers, transferring ownership of assets. The bank is dealing with one person, or initially dealt with one person, one borrower, or a series of borrowers, but they knew who they were dealing with. They had

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  1. Eli Akhavan: They went through all their documents, their financial disclosures. They knew which party they were comfortable dealing with.

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  1. Eli Akhavan: So when there are prohibited transfers, let's say to trusts, or to certain family members, or to an unrelated party, that could trigger these carve-outs. Again, fraud or misrepresentation could also

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  1. Eli Akhavan: In addition to be limited, could also be unlimited liability and become the personal debt of the guarantor. And insolvency, another, another,

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  1. Eli Akhavan: Carve-out provision, lenders put it.

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  1. Eli Akhavan: Another interesting part, and it is a question we get a lot, is personal financial statements for loans.

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  1. Eli Akhavan: So, typically, when the borrower wants to take out a large loan and has to provide a personal guarantee, otherwise the bank's not going to lend them money, you have to provide a personal financial statement. Now, many of our clients may have

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  1. Eli Akhavan: A large amount of wealth, and a substantial amount of wealth.

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  1. Eli Akhavan: But that wealth is tied up in structures. You know, for our clients, we're always setting up structures so that they're protected, both from asset protection purposes, as well as for estate and gift tax purposes. And these structures include sophisticated trusts. These trusts are here in…

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  1. Eli Akhavan: New York, they could be in Delaware, Nevada, Wyoming, South Dakota, but

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  1. Eli Akhavan: Wherever it is, they're in trust structures.

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  1. Eli Akhavan: Now, if a client is, or I should call, say, the borrower, is providing a financial statement, to take a loan, typically.

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  1. Eli Akhavan: they'll say, I mean, these are my assets, yeah, I don't own them, it's owned by a trust, but these are my assets. And they'll put it in there, in the personal financial statement, as part of their borrowing.

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  1. Eli Akhavan: when they… if and when they get sued, and they have to either provide and call to, make good and settle their personal guarantee, the question becomes, okay, these assets that I listed on my personal financial statement

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  1. Eli Akhavan: Are these assets that are held in trusts? Can the bank go after them?

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  1. Eli Akhavan: On the one hand, they're in trust, so they really never owned it.

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  1. Eli Akhavan: On the other hand, they did tell the bank they owned them, and they somewhat were pledging them, even though maybe technically on paper there was no UCC filing, there was no mortgage, but they weren't pledging them, so what happens then?

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  1. Eli Akhavan: And the answer is, it depends. It's gonna depend on the judge, and typically these things all get settled out of court, and very rarely do we come across settled cases on this, but there's a risk of the alter ego doctrine, where a judge is gonna say, hey, you put this on your personal financial statement.

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  1. Eli Akhavan: the trust is your alter ego. They may pierce the veil of the trust, I mean, again, hard things to do, but they could do it. Fraudulent inducement, they're gonna… the bank is gonna say, you know, we were fraudulently induced to make this loan.

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  1. Eli Akhavan: even though, through these personal financial statements, it could rise to the level of bank fraud. So you have to be careful with this.

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  1. Eli Akhavan: we all… I mean, these are generally managers that come to us afterhand, but beforehand, we always tell clients, once we do set up these trusts and these structures for them, I have always advised the client, by the way, in the future when you're going to apply for a loan.

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  1. Eli Akhavan: put an asterisk there on your personal financial statement. If you're listing the $10 million in an investment portfolio, they're holding with Jonathan, and you want to use that as part of the assets to make the, to persuade the bank to lend you money, put it in there that it's held in a trust for your benefit, or it's held in the family trust for your

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  1. Eli Akhavan: wife and your kids. Because if it's not there.

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  1. Eli Akhavan: Bank has a much stronger argument that they were fraudulently induced, and there was some sort of

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  1. Eli Akhavan: Untowered, inducement going on here.

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  1. Eli Akhavan: On the other hand, if it's…

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  1. Eli Akhavan: Clear on the personal financial statement, whether it's the footnote or somewhere there, that it makes it clear to the lender that the borrower's… these assets are held in some form of entity.

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  1. Eli Akhavan: The bank has much, you know, their big boys are sophisticated parties. It was on them to do further due diligence to either lend or not lend,

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  1. Eli Akhavan: to borrow money. And typically, as a general rule from what we have seen, banks are still willing to loan money. I mean, that's their engine of commerce, so…

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  1. Eli Akhavan: They are… they do want to make loans, and they just want to see that there's assets there. So having assets, health, and trust is not necessarily a hindrance to…

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  1. Eli Akhavan: getting a loan. On the other hand, if you don't disclose that these assets are owned by a trust, it could lead to difficulties and problems, later on.

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  1. Eli Akhavan: Some basic defenses for bad boy carve-outs when the bank is seeking to enforce them.

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  1. Eli Akhavan: For the loss recourse triggers, meaning that you have to pay for actual losses, obviously the argument is, oh, there are no losses. The bank did not suffer anything here. There was no damages to the bank, there was no, funds that they lost because of that. That's one.

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  1. Eli Akhavan: Lenders' unclean hands or interference, that's another one.

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  1. Eli Akhavan: So if the lender somewhat interfered with the real estate operations, if, they were in touch with competitors or anything of that nature, if the lender caused the loss or caused the

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  1. Eli Akhavan: borrower not to be able to pay, that would be another carve-out. Or if the lender, started making the borrower insolvent, through taking certain actions, again, that would be another way, as a defense.

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  1. Eli Akhavan: Bad act didn't actually happen. I see that common, frequently as well. So, let's say that, one of the carve-outs was

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  1. Eli Akhavan: if there is a, if the borrower incurred, additional indebtedness, in contravention to what the agreement said, well, what does that mean they incurred debt? Maybe they were just paying off, pre-existing debt. Maybe they were, part of their business operations, required that they have trade payables. They had to, enter into contract.

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  1. Eli Akhavan: with… vendors to just to carry on their business. That wasn't incurring debt.

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  1. Eli Akhavan: That was just the continuous operations of business. But these are some of the, positions that could be argued.

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  1. Eli Akhavan: This is a big problem that we see, a lot, and generally when it comes to, let's say, real estate joint ventures, nursing home operations, healthcare company operations, I've been getting a lot of these questions lately.

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  1. Eli Akhavan: You may have one bad apple partner.

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  1. Eli Akhavan: Okay, or one bad apple borrower, in a joint venture. And that one bad apple carbon triggers a carve-out provision.

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  1. Eli Akhavan: for the actual, enforcement of these bad boy carve-outs and bad boy guarantees. What happens then is, unfortunately, the innocent partners are typically held jointly and severally liable per the agreements, per the,

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  1. Eli Akhavan: personal guarantee agreement. So what do you do there? Just from the outset, you should be aware the courts, generally are rejecting the, I didn't do it defense. Your Honor, it was not me, it was my partner. The courts treat the guarantors as sophisticated parties, and they're responsible for that one bad actor.

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  1. Eli Akhavan: The logic is that guarantors effectively control the borrower, the guarantors knew who the borrower was, or this bad actor, and they still did business with him, and they failed to prevent him from doing the bad act, so the allocation of risk is on them.

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  1. Eli Akhavan: And not on anybody else. So some potential defenses there is a contribution and indemnity agreement among the partners, so in the event these things spring about, the partners amongst themselves are able to, address the situation

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  1. Eli Akhavan: and make sure that, that, they are made whole, or are at least obligated to be made whole, when the rogue partner, comes about. And again.

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  1. Eli Akhavan: These issues come about typically when there is, you know, in the beginning, everything was good, all the partners were getting along together, but then things go awry,

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  1. Eli Akhavan: Who they thought they knew was really their partner.

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  1. Eli Akhavan: Was somebody that was acting against the whole partnership's interests, and unfortunately, these things happen.

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  1. Eli Akhavan: Okay, so that covers personal guarantee risk and some potential defenses. What are some ways we can help with in terms of the asset protection planning?

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  1. Eli Akhavan: So I'm gonna go through just a few things, and then deal with trust. I think that's important. And to wrap it up, and of course, if you have any questions, I believe my contact information is at the end of these slides. Feel free to contact me.

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  1. Eli Akhavan: There's a range of asset protection planning. It's what I call the, there's vanilla asset protection.

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  1. Eli Akhavan: And the most sophisticated of them all is Offshore Asset Protection Trust. So, vanilla asset protection is umbrella insurance, having, exempt entities or exempt vehicles hold your assets, such as life insurance, retirement plans.

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  1. Eli Akhavan: There's business entities, which we, you know, discussed, joint ownership property, of course, segregation of liabilities. So these are the spectrum of asset production planning.

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  1. Eli Akhavan: The sophisticated one.

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  1. Eli Akhavan: And this is what we're going to discuss a little bit, are domestic and foreign private placement life insurance, foreign annuities, domestic asset protection trusts, this is becoming, a much larger part of our toolkit for asset protection planners, and foreign asset protection trusts. That's where you have the most sophisticated planning.

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  1. Eli Akhavan: So…

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  1. Eli Akhavan: The question is, you know, which one is the right one for your client, who is, and this is an important part.

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  1. Eli Akhavan: who's about to enter into a personal guarantee, and why do I say that?

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  1. Eli Akhavan: If you're in the real estate advisor, estate plan, or anything, in the private client advisory work.

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  1. Eli Akhavan: And especially if you have clients that you know are in real estate, and they're very active out there in the market, they're constantly in transactions, and you know they're going to be providing personal guarantees, you gotta tell them that, listen.

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  1. Eli Akhavan: you need to set up your asset structures and title to your assets appropriately now. You don't want to have an issue later on, after there's a bad boy carve-out triggering provision, after there is some sort of default, and that's when you're going to be owing money.

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  1. Eli Akhavan: you… and that's… that's not the appropriate time to do asset protection. Asset protection is done when things are clear, things are… the horizon is… is… is looking, is not dark and cloudy. That's when you want to do it. And we… clients need to understand what asset protection is and isn't.

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  1. Eli Akhavan: Nothing is bulletproof. No clients tell me, oh, so if I do XYZ,

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  1. Eli Akhavan: the creditor can't get assets. Well, no. Everything's up to a judge, and judges are all over the place when it comes to asset protection. I mean, they do make the law at the end of the day. There's no concealing or hiding of assets, you can't do that.

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  1. Eli Akhavan: You know, the best planning is when everything is revealed, everything is in front of the judge, and they still say, oh, this is an appropriate structure, there's nothing you can do here. Other factors to consider is access to assets. So the more your client has access to the assets,

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  1. Eli Akhavan: or let's say in the trust, the lower the level of potential protection, that's… that's out there. But the time to do the planning

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  1. Eli Akhavan: is way before, these transactions happen. So before engaging in a personal guarantee, what your client needs to do is set up a trust.

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  1. Eli Akhavan: is put the assets in the trust, and not hide that from the bank. Tell the bank, I mean, if they're putting it as part of their PFS, or personal financial statement.

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  1. Eli Akhavan: put it in there, my assets are in a Nevada trust, my assets are in the Wyoming Trust. I control the trust, but the assets are in there. Do that before entering into personal guarantee, and we can typically set up these trusts within a short amount of time, so as not to hold up any transaction, but it's important to do that beforehand.

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  1. Eli Akhavan: So what sort of, trust do I recommend, generally? For the typical real estate client that's doing business here in the United States, and they don't have

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  1. Eli Akhavan: too much exposure. Domestic asset protection trusts, I think, are a very, useful tool. And again, this is assuming there's no liability, nothing has happened yet, there's no bad boy triggering carve out, the PG has not been signed yet. So where can you go?

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  1. Eli Akhavan: These are all the jurisdictions that are currently… have what are called self-settled jurisdictions, and self-settled is something that many of our clients like. It means that the person putting the money into the trust may, may be a discretionary beneficiary of the assets.

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  1. Eli Akhavan: Of the trust. Now, you gotta tweak that a little bit, because you want to make sure that there's not much going on in terms of,

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  1. Eli Akhavan: activity and distributions to the person putting assets in, because that could erode

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  1. Eli Akhavan: the asset protection. So you gotta play it, wisely, but these are the places that are jurisdictions that allow it. The most famous ones and the most popular ones are Alaska, Delaware, Nevada, Wyoming, and South Dakota. So those are the jurisdictions that we typically use.

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  1. Eli Akhavan: What are the considerations to use within those? Well, there's, tr…

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  1. Eli Akhavan: you want to make sure that they don't have a lot of exception creditors, so Nevada is one of the best jurisdictions in the United States. They pretty much have no exception creditors, even marital claims, can't be asserted against a Nevada trust. So, these are certain,

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  1. Eli Akhavan: considerations to take into factors. Limitations of a Domestic Asset Protection Trust. At the end of the day, it's in the United States, and it's subject to U.S. court judgments, so… and there's also constitutional concerns. The constitutional concerns are, let's say you have a New York judgment, can that be enforced against a Nevada trustee?

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  1. Eli Akhavan: And we don't have a lot of case law out there. The ones that we do, come out of both ways. Generally, what we like to do is settle those out of court, but again, that goes back to the initial conversation, that it's all about leverage and positioning

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  1. Eli Akhavan: your client the right way. Here are some of the foreign asset protection jurisdictions, Bahamas, Belize, Cayman, not so much Cayman anymore, but the Cook Islands, Liechtenstein, Nevis, these are all great jurisdictions for asset protection, but

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  1. Eli Akhavan: this is not where I would recommend going in the event of a… your client's about to sign a personal guarantee, but it's just for your own edification to have these here. Let me just move a little bit forward,

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  1. Eli Akhavan: common features for the Domestic Asset Protection Trusts. There's short of statute of limitations, there's state and gift tax consequences of these type of trusts have to be fully vetted. Foreign trusts are a bit more complex for tax planning, could cause a lot of reporting and expensive reporting.

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  1. Eli Akhavan: The important part is that these trusts, everything should be discretionary. So the settler, the person putting the money in.

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  1. Eli Akhavan: has to be a discretionary beneficiary. The spouse has to be a discretionary beneficiary of the trust. Through these ways, this, the client can have access to the money, and I'll just end off with this, I'm one minute over.

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  1. Eli Akhavan: Domestic asset protection trusts provide a lot of flexibility. So, at the end of the day, the client will say, hey, I'm about to enter in this personal guarantee, but when it's all over, and the transaction is done, and all my ass… and let's say they sell the building, you know, I don't need this domestic asset protection trust anymore. What do I do then?

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  1. Eli Akhavan: Well, through these type of trusts, there's a lot of flexibility to wind them down, get the money back, or keep them in trusts for estate tax purposes, but Domestic Asset Protection Trust, I believe, a wonderful tool

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  1. Eli Akhavan: In the context of personal guarantees, but again, before entering into those. Thank you, everybody, for attending today. Again, my contact information is here. Feel free to, reach out with any questions. Back to you, Jonathan.

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Jonathan Shenkman: Great, thank you so much, Eli. If anyone has any specific questions, new business opportunities, or any other issues they'd like to discuss, please feel free to reach out directly to Eli or myself where appropriate. I'll be sure to include his contact information in the follow-up email to this program, and I think he's gonna send me the PowerPoint, which I'll also share in the email tomorrow morning. As I mentioned at the onset, the goal of these programs is to stay up-to-date on timely wealth management-related topics.

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Jonathan Shenkman: and to collaborate where appropriate. I think we can all agree that the clients who are best prepared

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Jonathan Shenkman: Are the ones who are served by a team of knowledgeable advisors.

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Jonathan Shenkman: Three more quick items before I let you go.

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Jonathan Shenkman: First, this concludes my fall webinar series, but don't worry, I'll be sending out my 2026 winter webinars in the coming days. In the meantime, if you have a friend or colleague who would find these webinars of interest, they can subscribe to my webinar distribution list by emailing me with the word webinar on the subject line. My email is jonathan at parkbridgewealth.com.

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Jonathan Shenkman: You can follow all my work on X and Instagram at Jonathan on Money, and by connecting with me on LinkedIn, you could also listen to my weekly podcast called Jonathan on Money, which is available on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts, and you can watch my practical planning videos, which I post several times a week, by following me on YouTube at Jonathan on Money as well.

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Jonathan Shenkman: And third, please take 30 seconds to fill out my survey at the end of this program. It helps me improve my webinars and provide timely and interesting content to attendees. I thank you in advance for that. And with that, this concludes today's session. Please stay safe and healthy, and have a wonderful day, everybody.