Happy Sunday!

Hopefully that headline got your attention. :)

What we’re going to talk about today is estate planning for drug dealers. We really are.

But what’s the context for you?

This is when you’d want to think about more robust asset protection strategies utilizing estate planning to meet the goal of not having everything taken when you are arrested (or sued).

I’m not a drug dealer, but I could imagine as a drug dealer I’d be worried about several things.

1. Getting shot while at work and not dying.

2. Getting shot while at work and dying.

3. Getting arrested while at work and being detained for a long period of time.

4. “Forgetting” to pay my income taxes and having the IRS take all of my assets.

Let’s tackle these one at a time to see what we should do.

The first and third possibilities, framed another way, is being alive but incapacitated. You are here but you might not be able to make decisions for yourself, access your assets, and conduct business.

The proper solution here would be to appoint a Medical Power of Attorney and a Financial Power of Attorney.

Your Financial Power of Attorney would be able to pay bills, access money, run your business (this would be if you had a legal business) and generally conduct your affairs until you were able to.

The third and fourth possibilities also include a wrinkle – the seizure of your assets.

And that’s something we want to protect against.

The way to do this in estate planning is with an irrevocable trust.

And, and this is important whether you are conducting illegal activity or not, you need to create and fund this trust BEFORE you anticipate anything happening (i.e. before you think you’re going to get sued).

The irrevocable trust setup works like this: (1) create the trust; (2) name someone that is not you as the trustee; (3) name someone that is not you as the beneficiary (usually your spouse or your kids); and (4) start putting stuff into the trust.

The less control/involvement you have with the trust the better.

As you move assets into this trust, they leave your ownership and move into third party owners, making it EXTREMELY difficult, if not impossible, to get access to.

Last, but not least, we’ve got the second scenario, death.

For that, they’d want to think about all the things we all think about when it comes to estate planning: who do we want in charge; where do we want everything to go; and how do we want the people receiving our assets to receive them (all at once, over time, etc.).

There you go – estate planning for drug dealers. Hope you enjoyed this!

Have a great week!

Cheers,

Christopher Small
Owner
CMS Law Firm LLC

PS – we love referrals! If you know someone that could use our help, please let them know about us!