Reddit reviews Asset Protection : Concepts and Strategies for Protecting Your Wealth

OK two general principles:

(1) A bad asset protection plan might be worse than no plan at all.
(2) Offshore/foreign trusts/entities/accounts are only as useful as your willingness to relocate to those jurisdictions.

There are some other things to consider:

(a) Assets before marriage are non-marital property; however
(b) A judge might order you to pay spousal/child support, even if you don't have a job, in which case non-marital assets become de-facto marital assets when the asset seizures start.
(c) Retirement accounts, protected from almost all creditors on public policy grounds, since these represent your future income when you can no longer provide for yourself, are fair game in divorce, and in general cannot be included in an asset protection plan.
(d) The IRS gives you a long rope, and you can easily hang yourself trying to protect assets, only to end up owing Uncle Sam huge amounts, which will be used to provide entitlement benefits for single mothers.

Read this book five times:

http://www.amazon.com/Asset-Protection-Concepts-Strategies-Protecting/dp/0071432167

Then you need to understand the law in your state, since state-specific things are very important. What works in some states does not work in others, because some state's laws are more hosed than others.

The basic strategy is to organize your affairs so that insane family law is thwarted by, for example, sane business law.

For example, the single best asset protection structure out there is probably an LLC when used for a legitimate business purpose with one or more business partners. This is because assets in a partnership-type business have been protected under English common law doctrine for hundreds of years. Just need to do your homework.

Yes, there are a lot of ways to do that, and they have different costs and benefits and risks.

However, it's not a product you can buy - it's a carefully designed structure that depends a lot on exactly what threats you're concerned about, what sort of assets you're wanting to protect, what kind of access you need to the assets, and the tax and estate planning implications.

If you could just buy some magic beans that would make all legal risks go away, nobody would ever successfully sue anyone, and we could all run around stealing from each other with no worry about the consequences, because we'd all have the magic beans.

Wait, maybe that wouldn't be so awesome . . .

This book is the best I'm aware of on the topic - but if you're looking for a simple bulletproof solution, you're going to be gravely disappointed. If you find someone who tells you they have a solution to your problem, you just need to pay them $X and everything will be fixed, run away - you have found a con man.

Here are a couple books I'm looking at already:

Asset Protection : Concepts and Strategies for Protecting Your Wealth https://www.amazon.com/dp/0071432167/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_WehYBbFEWFEYM

The ABA Consumer Guide to Asset Protection: A Step-by-Step Guide to Preserving Wealth https://www.amazon.com/dp/1627227652/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_O2hYBbM9EEYYB