All Forum Posts by: Mike S.

 In most State a mailbox would not be enough as you need a person to receive service of legal documents..

 If you are able to receive service at your address during business hours, 5 days a week then sure its cheaper. However, for most of us, we don't have staff manning the address and you definitely don't want to put your home address either for privacy and safety reasons..

For privacy, you name will still be listed in the member/manager section unless your LLC is in one of the anonymous state (WY, NV, NM...).

There are many registered agent company, and they almost all providing the same service. Some will also, for an additional cost, do remailing and let you use that address as principal office.

The average cost for a basic registered agent is usually between $45 and $100/year. Just shop around and look for the best price. I am not convinced that there is any difference in quality between providers for the basic service that they offer.

A grantor living trust is for estate planning. You are the grantor, the trustee and the initial beneficiary. At your death, you have a successor trustee(s) and successor beneficiary(ies). Basically, while you are alive, you are still doing everything you want with your property. However, at your death, you avoid probate completely.

A land trust is a different kind of trust, and for these ones, you want a different trustee (for anonymity on the property records and also to avoid the risk of voiding the trust), and usually your beneficiary would be an LLC. I never opened any bank account directly for them, but for the LLC.

There is also, for estate planning, the Lady Bird deed, that also avoids probate on your homestead property, but avoids too in some states some detrimental side effects for Medicare of the living trust.

Yes, you need to put the LLC as named insured, and yourself as additional insured.

I'll try to give you an average cost for an LLC:

Registration with the state: between $50 and $800 depending on the State

Operating agreement creation: from $0 up to around $1000 if you use a lawyer.

Maintenance:

State renewal: between $0 and $800/year depending on the State

Registered agent: $50 to $150/year

As explained above, it is usually better to have the LLCs owning the properties in the same state than the properties.

However be careful with single member LLC in Florida (see the Olmstead v. Federal Trade Commission case). You won't get the charging order as exclusive remedy for outside protection.

Look into having your single member FL LLCs owned by a WY holding LLC to keep that outside protection.

Avoid contacting your lender... See mistake #4

First of all I'm not an attorney and this is my personal understanding of the subject.

In theory there is no difference between different LLCs and a serie LLC (except the cost and the fact that only a few states are offering it yet).

However, series LLC are a relatively new animal in the arena and I am not sure that a lot of case law have been settled yet. Until it strength is fully tested in court, one may believe that there could be some technicalities that would make them weaker in some aspects. Until these glitches and appropriate fixes are found, I wouldn't like to be one of these test cases.

The problem is that you would never know how many you avoided. But I could surely see how it can limit your attractiveness against contingency layer.

In case of a judgment against you, you will have to disclose your assets if you are ordered to. But I don't see why you would have to disclose it before. Again anonymity is not enough by itself to protect you, but it is an easy additional layer that has its benefit