Asset Protection Services in Granite Shoals, TX
Asset protection is not one document. It is a system. Trusts. LLCs. Homestead. Insurance. Retirement-account structuring. Each layer makes you a harder target.
Protection that works is a system, not a document.
When a lawsuit lands, the question is not whether you have a trust. The question is whether the plaintiff's attorney, after running judgment-discovery, finds anything worth pursuing. Asset protection is the practice of designing your financial structure so that the answer is no — or at minimum, that pursuing it would cost more than it could possibly recover. Done right, most claims settle on insurance limits because there is nothing else productive to collect against.
We build asset protection in layers. The first layer is what Texas law gives you for free — homestead, retirement accounts, life-insurance cash value, and annuities, all of which are statutorily exempt from creditors. The second layer is structural — LLCs around any asset that generates liability, trusts holding the LLC interests so ownership stays private. The third layer is targeted — irrevocable trusts for legacy assets you have decided to wall off permanently. Each layer reduces what is reachable. Together they change the math of suing you.
The exemptions you already have, if you claim them.
Texas is one of the most asset-protective states in the country. Before we build any structure, we make sure every exemption available under Texas Property Code Chapters 41 and 42 is fully claimed and properly documented.
Four threats a real plan should anticipate.
Asset protection is not about hiding money. It is about building a structure that holds up under realistic scenarios. These are the scenarios we design for most often.
Lawsuits
Slip-and-falls, car accidents that exceed insurance, professional liability, contract disputes, employment claims. Texas juries occasionally return large verdicts. The structure should mean a large verdict against you personally does not become a large recovery.
Divorce — yours or a child's
Your own divorce can be planned around with a properly structured plan. More commonly, parents protect inheritance assets from a child's eventual divorce by leaving them in trust rather than outright.
Business creditors and personal guarantees
Most small-business loans require a personal guarantee. We cannot remove the guarantee, but we can make sure assets outside the guaranteed line are sitting in structures the lender cannot reach.
Long-term care costs
Nursing care averages $7,000 a month in Texas and can run $10,000+ on the high end. Without planning, a single year wipes out $84,000–$120,000 of savings. With irrevocable planning done five years out, Medicaid pays instead.
Each layer does one job. Together they do everything.
A real asset-protection plan is not a single structure but a stack of structures, each handling a different category of risk. The base layer is Texas's statutory exemptions, which we maximize through how your home, retirement, and insurance are titled. Above that sits a layer of LLCs — one around each asset that generates liability, so a lawsuit arising from one property cannot reach the others or your personal balance sheet. Above that, a revocable trust holds the LLC interests, which adds privacy and succession to the entity-level protection.
For clients with materially more to protect, we add a fourth layer: an irrevocable trust, often a domestic asset-protection trust or a SLAT, that holds the assets that have already been earmarked for the next generation. Those assets are removed from your estate, beyond the reach of future creditors, and outside the jurisdiction of a domestic divorce court if structured correctly. The trade-off, as always, is irrevocability — we only recommend this layer when the assets in question are genuinely already committed.
- Layer 1 — Texas exemptions — Homestead, IRA, 401(k), life insurance, annuities.
- Layer 2 — Entity isolation — An LLC around each liability-generating asset.
- Layer 3 — Trust ownership — Revocable trust holds the LLC interests for privacy and succession.
- Layer 4 — Irrevocable lockbox — For legacy assets that are already committed to the next generation.
Why you have to build this before you need it.
Texas, like every other state, has a fraudulent-transfer statute. The Texas Uniform Fraudulent Transfer Act (now the Texas Uniform Voidable Transactions Act, Business & Commerce Code Chapter 24) gives creditors the power to unwind transfers made with the intent to hinder, delay, or defraud them — and the law gives courts a wide latitude to infer that intent from circumstances. The most common circumstance is timing. If you transfer assets into a trust the week after a lawsuit is filed, a court will reach those assets without much trouble.
What this means in practice is that the conversation has to happen before there is a problem. Once a claim is reasonably foreseeable — once you have been served, once a demand letter has arrived, once an incident has occurred that you know will lead somewhere — your window for protective planning has closed. Anything you move now is exposed to clawback. The transfers that work are the ones made in calm weather, when you have no creditors knocking and no specific threat in view. Those transfers are presumed valid because there is no fraudulent intent to infer.
We have turned away clients who came to us mid-lawsuit looking for shelter, and we will continue to. Not because we cannot draft the documents but because we will not draft documents that we know will be set aside. The right time to do this is when nothing is wrong — five years before you need it, ten years before you need it, before you take on the high-liability practice or buy the rental portfolio or sign the personal guarantee. After is too late.
What clients want to know before we structure.
Yes. Asset protection planning done in advance of any claim is fully legal — every state's laws encourage individuals to structure their affairs to take advantage of available protections. What is not legal is fraudulent transfer (moving assets after a claim arises to defeat that specific creditor). The difference is timing and intent, both of which we document carefully.
No. Hiding assets is fraud — and if anyone tells you otherwise, walk away. Asset protection makes assets unreachable, not invisible. Everything we set up is properly filed, properly disclosed on tax returns, and properly recorded with the relevant counties. The protection comes from how the assets are held, not from secrecy.
Texas courts can disregard an entity for fraud, alter-ego liability, or undercapitalization. We design every structure with those rules in mind — separate bank accounts, real operating activity, proper records, adequate capitalization, and respect for entity formalities. Structures that fail are usually the ones that were treated as a paper exercise. Ours are not.
Lenders adapt to trust and entity ownership routinely. Mortgage lenders will lend to a trust without difficulty — the Garn–St. Germain Act protects revocable trust transfers from due-on-sale issues. Business lenders may require personal guarantees regardless of structure, but those guarantees are bounded by the asset securing the loan rather than by your full balance sheet.
A basic layered plan for a Hill Country family — homestead optimization, an LLC or two, a funded revocable trust — typically falls in the $3,500 to $7,500 range as a flat fee. Adding irrevocable layers, multi-entity series LLC structures, or out-of-state asset protection trusts increases the cost in line with the complexity. Every engagement starts with a free consultation and a written quote.
Plans rarely use just one tool.
Most plans combine more than one service. These pair naturally with what you are reading about.
Highland Lakes and Hill Country coverage.
We work with families across central Texas. Click your town for local details.
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