Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Perfectly fine to be anonymous, but it's dangerous that if you are that anonymous, it is dangerous to have that anonymous entity, whether it's holding it in a land trust, as the trustee of the land trust, or whether it's holding it directly holding real estate with these anonymous llcs, we can make an LLC completely anonymous in the state of Florida, meaning that if someone looks it up on Sunbiz, they will not see your name attached to it. The only thing, the only person that you have to put in your Sunbiz listing in your report is the manager of the LLC, because anybody pulling it up in Florida should be able to look at it and know who the manager is and who has the right or ability to sign and bind that company legally to a contract.
[00:01:04] One of the things that we can do is we can set up a trust that is your manager. So the manager that shows up on the Sunbiz records for your LLC would be a manager trust, and you are the trustee. But no one sees that trust agreement except you. So if anyone ever asks for it in the future, you can show them the trust agreement and say, yeah, here we are. I'm the man. I'm the trustee of this manager trust. So I'm going to sign so and so John Smith as trustee of the XYZ manager trust, and that will, as manager of ABC Capital LLC, as the, as the manager of that company. So you can be anonymous in the state of Florida, and of course, you can be anonymous in Wyoming with the Wyoming LLC. You can be anonymous in Delaware, with Nevada, whatever. You can be anonymous.
[00:01:56] But my number one warning to everyone is perfectly fine to be anonymous. But it's, it's dangerous that if you are that anonymous, it is dangerous to have that anonymous entity, whether it's holding it in a land trust, as the trustee of the land trust, or whether it's holding it directly holding real estate.
[00:02:18] Because, and I preach this over and over. For, for 24 years, I was in real estate title. I did closings for people. And for over 20 of those years, well, over 20 of those years, the closings were inside Florida. So I know what it takes when someone comes to me as an LLC and they are the owner of the property and they say, I'm going to sell it or I'm going to mortgage the property, I'm going to refinance it and take another loan out, there are very few questions that we ask those folks. We ask to see a copy of the art, especially if it's like a Wyoming LLC, for instance. We ask to see a copy of the articles of organization or articles of formation or certificate of formation from that state, and we ask to see an operating agreement.
[00:03:09] And they can either produce an operating agreement that they've just found on the Internet or had an artificial intelligence draft up for them out of the blue, saying that they are the member of this LLC and that they are the manager with full authority to act. And then once we have the articles filed, we have the operating agreement that they produce to us, or they can say, well, I don't have an operating agreement, so I'm just operating under the statute. We have them sign an affidavit that there's no operating agreement and that they are the manager of the LLC. So we get an affidavit from them, and then we have another affidavit that we can record that says that they are the manager of the LLC. They have authority to sign and to do what they're. What they are doing with the property. And then we record that. And if they take out a mortgage, they borrow against the property. If they sell it, they get the money from the property, from the sale. So all this comes in to them, and there is no way for anyone to verify that because it is so secretive, because you, the owner, didn't want anybody to know who really owned this property. You went so far that a title agent had no way of ever verifying who really owned this property. So they went through the closing, and they distributed the money. Whether it was a refinance or a sale, they sold it, and the property's gone. And you're going to show up when you realize you didn't get the tax bill that year, and you're going to say, maybe it was vacant land, and you're going to say, wait, I didn't get the tax bill. Where's the tax bill? And you go look it up and realize there's another owner now. And you're going to say, wait, what happened? What happened to this land of mine? And you're going. You're going to see the title company that prepared the deed and everything. You're going to call them. You can say, why did you sell my property? And they're going to say, it wasn't your property. We have all the documentation in our file showing that Jeannie Mae, this lady over here, Jeannie Mae Smith, showed up and she said she owned it, and she showed us all the paperwork. So she closed it, she sold it, she signed everything under penalties of perjury. And all this other stuff, it's gone. Property's gone. And then when the FBI or local law enforcement gets involved and they start doing their investigation, they look at Ginnie Mae Smith's driver's license, realize, well, it's a really good fake, but it's fake or fraudulent. And everything she did was fraudulent. She stole your money. And what you find out is actually your money went to her. She was a mule. The money then went to Jamaica and went to Russia, or it went to Canada and it went to China or North Korea. And the money's gone. Your money's gone, and your property is screwed up, the title screwed up. And now this new owner who bought the property, they have a title insurance claim, at least, you know, they can maybe get their money back from the title insurance company. But that's it. You know, everything else is screwed up and it's going to take a long time to unscrew it, to fix it. So I'm a big advocate for not being completely anonymous in real property ownership. There needs to be a way for a title agent or closing attorney or whoever to find the owner through an independent mechanism, maybe looking it up on the Internet, who the owner is, and then maybe trying to find that owner, that company on the Internet, and then calling them or emailing them and saying, hey, we've got somebody here selling this property or mortgaging this property. We see that you are the trustee of the property, so we need you to sign these documents. Now, if we are the trustee, that's going to come to us and we're going to then reach out to the beneficiary and say, hey, we just got a call from a title company. They say it's closing and they want us to sign all these documents tomorrow.
[00:07:05] Are you okay with us signing these documents and you as the beneficiary, you're going to say, I'm not selling the property or I'm not refinancing the property and it's going to stop everything. But if you held it in a land trust where you were the trustee in one of these Wyoming llcs that's completely anonymous, or you put it into a friend's name as the trustee, and then soon after closing, they resigned and. But you kept the resignation hidden in your back pocket so that you then became the new successor trustee, but you didn't tell anybody. And then they start looking for this friend. But lo and behold, somebody shows up and they have someone with the same friend's name. They have their id, and it looks like them. They've opened a bank account, they've done everything else. Then they go ahead and they close, they refinance, they sell it. Nobody knew. Oh wait, maybe we should have done some more digging because they had no reason to do any more digging because you were so clever about, well, my buddy's my trustee, but then he actually resigned and then appointed me as a successor trustee. But we kept that all hidden. Haha. Well, you just screwed yourself. You lost your own property because you were so clever and so anonymous that the title agent had no way of confirming who really owned the property. Or you put it into a Wyoming LLC or a Wyoming LLC as the trustee of the land trust. And they had no way of confirming who the real managers are, who the real owners are of this LLC because hey, it was just formed this year. So how, how else are we going to confirm who really owns this LLC? Well, they signed an affidavit, they showed up, they had a bank account, we wired the money, it's gone, it's done. And you know, you had some culpability in that because you did it to yourself, because you made it so anonymous. That's why we're a big advocate for using. If you're going to do land trust, if you want to remain anonymous, use a third party trustee that is well known across the state. There, there's our company, there's some other companies out there that anybody, most title companies and closing agents across the state already know us. They know we exist because we hold thousands of properties across the state. They know other companies too. They know other law firms, not law firms, but law firms, companies that hold land trusts as trustee professionally for people. And yes, it costs a little bit of money, but it doesn't cost the property to do that. So that's my two cent on asset protection, anonymous companies being too anonymous and how dangerous it is and some basics just about inside and outside creditors and other issues about multi member llcs and other issues that you need to be aware of. When you start talking about asset protection with an attorney, you need to have this basic knowledge in your head so that you know, you know what you need to be, the questions you need to be asking and how you need to be prepared whenever you go into that meeting with that asset protection attorney of how you're going to protect your anonymity, how you're going to remain confidential on the public records, as well as how you're going to protect yourself from not only inside creditors with insurance, but also outside creditors with good planning. So that's it for today's ask Joe on the trust. This podcast. If you have any other questions you ever want to ask me about anything legally related, especially land trust, real estate, private lending, deeding, estate planning, asset protection in the state of Florida, please do not hesitate to connect with us through the comments below or through our social media, or text us or even send us a voice note by email to helloylandtrustee.com and we will be happy to answer your questions right here next time you see me. Until then, have a great day and trust this thanks for listening to this edition of Trust this. If you got something out of it, please press like and subscribe and give us a five star review to help us reach others who can benefit from this series. Until next time, keep aspiring to a better life.
