Virtual General Counsel and Estate Planning Services in Arizona, New Jersey, & Pennsylvania

“By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.”

– Benjamin Franklin

“If you don’t know where you are going, you’ll end up someplace else.”

– Yogi Berra

Ely W. Sluder, Esq. provides experienced legal counsel services that can give you the solid footing needed to stand strong and seize life—CARPE VITAM!

LIFE HAPPENS. And when it does, it can feel like being caught in the surf, wave after wave just beating, wearing, tearing you down. The key to having the solid footing needed to prevail is having a good, proactive foundation upon which to stand, a plan.

Waiting for life to happen and then reacting is like trying to stand on loose, shifting sand—it can take tremendously more energy and effort to stand strong.

“An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” So goes the old saying. What twenty years of practicing law has shown is that when it comes to legal matters, an ounce of legal prevention can be worth a TON of cure.

There are few things in this world more frustrating, exhausting, and insanely expensive as litigation. A good planning attorney, whether they are helping plan how to administer your estate or plan out a successful business relationship, needs to be Nostradamus, a fortune teller, a soothsayer in order to predict and address all the different ways you might lose your footing, legally speaking.

“There are dreamers and there are planners; the planners make their dreams come true.”

- Edwin Louis Cole

“Planning is bringing the future into the present so that you can do something about it now.”

- Alan Lakein

An ounce of prevention may take the form of:

  • A properly structured asset protection plan limiting a plaintiff’s recovery efforts to the maximum amount of the client’s insurance coverage ($1M), significantly less than what the plaintiff was seeking ($5M+).

  • A single member LLC having a written operating agreement making it manager-managed and the client the sole Manager, which a judge held was sufficient evidence to support a ruling in favor of the client.

  • A client owning a rental property in an LLC instead of their own name, personally, in order to limit any liability related to the rental property to the assets of the LLC—which should be the one rental property and nothing else—preventing any plaintiffs from reaching the personal assets of the client (their home, investment account, vacation home, etc.).

  • An estate plan properly structured so the heirs receive the assets at a “stepped up basis”—meaning their tax basis is the fair market value of the asset at the time of death, not when the person bequeathing first acquired the property, which could avoid the heir owing a substantial amount of capital gains taxes.

  • An estate plan properly structured so that an inheritance can be held in trust for (and used for the benefit of) an heir who is not yet old/mature enough to handle receiving a significant of amount of cash and other assets outright, who suffers from substance abuse, is incapacitated such that receiving an inheritance outright will negatively affect their governmental benefits, or who is going through a divorce or facing creditor issues.

“Intellectuals solve problems, geniuses prevent them.”

- Albert Einstein

“An hour of planning can save you 10 hours of doing.”

- Dale Carnegie

“The way to get started is to quit talking and start doing.”

- Walt Disney

“A goal without a plan is just a wish.”

- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry