Deciding how to structure a corporation/company

[Jason Drager]

Hello! I am interested in starting in (residential) real estate investing within the next year or two (within Iowa), once some personal debt has been paid off. I am trying to decide what kind of corporate entity (if any) I should utilize. I am tentatively leaning toward buy/hold turnkey multi-family properties and utilizing a property manager, while I continue to work my day job; my wife is adamantly opposed to moving, so no house-hacking. 😉

I would tentatively be co-owners of this enterprise with my wife, and ideally would pass the enterprise down to our daughters upon our deaths.

My father owned a small professional practice while I was growing up, so I got to experience many of the benefits of business ownership growing up; lots and lots of things able to be run through as “business expenses” (cars, phones, computers, etc.), retirement benefits, etc. The ability to hire my girls as employees and begin contributing to their retirement plans while they are young and establishing themselves, like my father did for me, is something I very much want to be able to do.

My biggest concern, however, it making sure that my personal assets are protected as thoroughly as possible from any/all concerns, such as liability, or if this venture goes catastrophically awry and goes bankrupt. However, I will absolutely be wanting to optimize my financing in any way that I can, so that would also be a factor (wife and I will both be 100% debt-free, with excellent credit).

I've read a few posts/articles on here so far, and "LLC" seems to be the most suggested answer. I took the quiz located at https://www.mycorporation.com/entity-choice-wizard/#!/, and both LLC and C Corp (almost universally discommended on here, it seems) were tied as the best results.

My gut tells me that my above wishlist isn’t going to all be satisfied with any single structure. I will also be consulting with a local attorney as we go about this process, to get professional advice, as well as to draft and help manage whatever entity we go with. However, I wanted to post on here to see what feedback I’d get, and if perhaps there were factors that I was overlooking or misunderstanding.

Gratitude in advance for the assistance! Apologies if I have missed a more definitive guide concerning this issue.