Key Takeaways

• Insurance is your first line of defense — but policy limits and exclusions mean it’s never enough on its own. Real asset protection requires layered legal strategies.
• Florida offers some of the strongest built-in debtor protections in the country: homestead protection, tenancy by the entireties for married couples, and retirement account exemptions — but each has gaps that planning must fill.
• The best time to plan is when nothing is wrong. Once a lawsuit is filed or threatened, many options disappear — and moving assets at that point can trigger fraudulent transfer laws that make everything worse.
• LLCs protect assets inside the entity from outside liability — but single-member LLCs leave a critical gap that many people don’t know about until it’s too late.
• Asset protection planning isn’t a one-time event. It has to evolve as your wealth grows, your family changes, and the law shifts.

If you’ve spent decades building wealth as an aerospace engineer, a physician, a real estate investor, or a business owner on Florida’s Space Coast, you’ve probably thought about protecting it. Maybe you have good insurance. Maybe you set up an LLC for your rental properties. Maybe you’ve heard that Florida is a “debtor-friendly” state and assumed you were covered.

The reality, according to Stephen Lacey of Lacey Rezanka Attorneys at Law, is that most high-net-worth individuals have significant gaps in their asset protection — gaps they don’t discover until a lawsuit, a creditor claim, or a catastrophic event makes those gaps impossible to ignore.

Stephen Lacey is an estate planning, probate, real estate, and elder law attorney with a master’s degree in taxation from the University of Florida. His firm serves clients throughout Brevard County, Indian River County, and Palm Beach County — from Titusville, Rockledge, Viera, Melbourne, Suntree, and Palm Bay to Merritt Island, Cape Canaveral, Cocoa Beach, Satellite Beach, Indian Harbor Beach, Indialantic, Melbourne Beach, and Malabar. In this episode of Legacy Liftoff, he walks through how asset protection actually works, who needs it, and what mistakes people make that leave everything they’ve built exposed.

Who Needs Asset Protection Planning — and Why Right Now

The professionals Stephen Lacey works with most frequently — aerospace engineers at Kennedy Space Center, physicians, and real estate investors across Brevard County — tend to have three things in common.

Stephen Lacey: “One is they have assets. They have good paying jobs, they accumulate assets. They also often are in more liability-exposed areas. And the third thing is they’re all busy. So they all put this off — this very important conversation — until sometimes it’s too late.”

Physicians carry malpractice exposure. Real estate investors face potential liability from tenants, contractors, and visitors to their properties. Business owners face employee and customer claims. The more wealth you accumulate in a high-liability profession, the more critical it becomes to build legal structures around that wealth before anything goes wrong.

Why Insurance Isn’t Enough

The first pushback most high-net-worth individuals offer is some version of: “I have good insurance. I’m covered.”

Insurance is important — Stephen Lacey calls it your first line of defense. But it has real limitations that leave even well-insured people exposed.

First, insurance companies are not eager to pay out large claims. They will look for policy exclusions — the fine print on page 37 — to justify denial. Second, every policy has a liability cap. A catastrophic event, like a fatal car accident, can exhaust a $1 million policy quickly. Third, most people haven’t updated their coverage as their wealth has grown. Someone who bought an umbrella policy when they were worth $1 million and is now worth $10 million is dramatically underinsured — and may not realize it.

When reviewing umbrella coverage, Stephen Lacey looks for specific gaps: Does it cover business activities? Rental properties? Recreational vehicles like a boat or jet ski? Those are the kinds of exclusions an insurance company will reach for when a large claim comes in.

The conclusion is straightforward: insurance is where protection starts, not where it ends.

The Window You Don’t Want to Miss

One of the most important things to understand about asset protection is timing. Stephen Lacey describes it as a pendulum.

Stephen Lacey: “When nothing is happening, when everything is peachy and there’s no problems, that’s your best time for asset protection.”

Once a lawsuit is filed — or even anticipated — the options narrow significantly. Moving assets at that stage can trigger Florida’s fraudulent transfer statutes, which allow courts to reverse those transactions entirely. And it isn’t just the reversal that damages a client. Being found to have transferred assets to frustrate a known creditor colors the judge’s or jury’s entire view of the case, making a favorable outcome or settlement far less likely.

Even routine transfers that have always been part of someone’s financial life — annual gifts to children, for example — can be characterized as fraudulent if a creditor existed at the time. Intent doesn’t always need to be proven.

There are some moves available even at the eleventh hour: paying down a homestead mortgage (protected from creditors) or purchasing an annuity. But these are far less effective than strategies put in place well in advance. The goal of asset protection planning isn’t total immunity from every claim — it’s to give creditors enough difficulty that they agree to settle for a fraction of what they originally demanded. Leaving some assets available actually helps achieve that, because it signals to a court that the planning wasn’t designed solely to defraud.

Florida’s Built-In Protections — and Where They Fall Short

Florida is genuinely one of the most debtor-friendly states in the country, and that matters for anyone building wealth here. Three statutory protections form the baseline of any asset protection conversation.

Homestead protection is the strongest of the three, rooted in the Florida Constitution itself. Your primary residence is fully shielded from creditor claims, with only narrow exceptions: unpaid mortgage, property taxes, construction liens, and HOA dues. There is no cap on the home’s value. The key caveat is that to claim this protection, you must actually treat the property as your primary residence — spending most of your time in another state while claiming Florida homestead creates a serious vulnerability.

Tenancy by the entireties is a special titling designation available only to married couples. Assets properly titled this way cannot be reached by a creditor of just one spouse — the creditor must have a claim against both spouses jointly. This is powerful protection, but it ends the moment one spouse dies. A creditor who has been waiting can act immediately at that point. There’s also a less obvious risk: if a marriage deteriorates, both spouses have full access to jointly held assets. Stephen Lacey has seen situations where a physician relied on tenancy by the entireties, and a spouse going through a difficult split drained the accounts.

Retirement account exemptions protect IRAs, 401(k)s, and similar accounts from creditors under both federal and state law. If the account rolls over to a surviving spouse, that protection continues. Florida goes further than federal law on inherited IRAs: while a U.S. Supreme Court ruling determined that inherited IRAs don’t qualify for federal protection (“if you didn’t work for it, we’re not going to give you the protection”), Florida has a state statute that preserves that protection for Florida residents. A beneficiary in another state may or may not have that protection depending on where they live.

For a married Space Coast professional with a substantial home, significant retirement savings, and properly titled joint accounts, these three protections together can cover the majority of their net worth. But the gaps — automobiles, brokerage accounts, business interests, boats — are where additional planning becomes essential.

LLCs: The Bubble Strategy for Real Estate Investors

For real estate investors across Brevard County, the LLC is often the first asset protection tool that comes up. Stephen Lacey uses a simple mental model: think of an LLC as a bubble.

If something goes wrong inside the bubble — a slip and fall at a rental property, for example — the liability generally can’t escape to reach the owner’s personal assets. But if two properties share the same bubble, a problem at one exposes the other. The argument for one LLC per property is that a liability at Property A can’t reach Properties B, C, or D when each is in its own separate entity.

The practical challenge: more LLCs mean more administrative work — separate bank accounts, operating agreements, tax schedules, and books for each entity. For an investor with 29 rental properties, that’s 29 of everything. The conversation becomes one of balancing protection against administrative burden, and sometimes the answer involves grouping properties strategically rather than maximizing entity count.

What LLCs don’t protect against is equally important to understand.

First, the single-member LLC gap: a single-member LLC does a good job protecting personal assets from liabilities inside the entity, but it doesn’t protect the entity itself from the owner’s personal creditors. A creditor of the individual can attach a single-member LLC membership interest and effectively take over the asset. A multi-member LLC has what’s called “charging order remedy protection” — a creditor of one member can only attach distributions coming out of the LLC, not the membership interest itself. The trade-off is a more complex tax return, but the protection is significantly stronger.

Second, corporate formalities must be maintained. An LLC without a separate bank account, without an operating agreement, with assets still titled in the owner’s personal name, and with funds commingled with personal finances is effectively not an LLC for protection purposes. Courts can pierce the LLC structure entirely when these formalities aren’t followed.

Third, professional negligence claims can pierce through. For contractors working at Kennedy Space Center, physicians, and other licensed professionals, a negligence-based claim may reach through the LLC to personal assets. That makes it especially important for these individuals to ensure their personal assets are also protected through other mechanisms.

When Irrevocable Trusts Enter the Conversation

At a certain level of wealth or complexity, the conversation shifts from LLCs to irrevocable trusts — and the key distinction is ownership.

Stephen Lacey: “With the irrevocable trust, you no longer own the asset. The trust owns it. Whereas an LLC, you have more ownership, you have a bit more ability to touch the asset.”

Irrevocable trusts come into play most often in three situations: when estate tax planning is relevant (though the federal threshold is now $15–30 million for married couples), when nursing home and Medicaid planning is needed for older clients with $1–3 million in assets, and when maximum asset protection beyond what entity structures can provide is the goal.

What does giving up ownership actually mean in practice? Less than many people fear, if the trust is designed correctly. Depending on the structure, a grantor may be able to change the trustee, hold a power of appointment to change beneficiaries, access assets under specific conditions (health, education, maintenance, and support), have a say in investment decisions, and receive income even without access to principal.

Florida does not have its own domestic asset protection trust statute — and in fact has a public policy against self-settled trusts. Some clients explore out-of-state trusts, such as those sited in Nevada, but courts are increasingly skeptical when the only connection to that state is a hired trustee and a document. For clients who want maximum protection and understand the risks involved, offshore trusts in jurisdictions like the Cook Islands — which do not recognize foreign judgments and require creditors to re-litigate entirely from scratch — are another option, though they require placing significant faith in an institution operating halfway around the world.

Mistakes That Undo Good Planning

Even people who take asset protection seriously often make mistakes that eliminate the protection they thought they had. Stephen Lacey walks through the ones he encounters most frequently.

Adding a child to a bank account for convenience — often suggested by bank tellers — destroys the tenancy by the entireties protection on that account and introduces a new person whose personal liabilities now expose the entire account.

Assuming a single-member LLC provides full protection, when it actually leaves the membership interest exposed to personal creditors.

Believing a revocable trust provides asset protection, when it offers none beyond what the individual already has. An irrevocable trust provides protection; a revocable trust does not.

Treating an irrevocable trust like a personal bank account — withdrawing assets freely and ignoring the legal structure — eliminates the protection the trust was designed to provide.

Skipping corporate formalities with an LLC — no separate bank account, no operating agreement, commingled finances — makes the entity meaningless for protection purposes.

Asset Protection Is a Living Plan

Asset protection planning isn’t something you complete once and set aside. It has to evolve alongside changes in wealth, family circumstances, and the law.

Stephen Lacey: “Estate planning itself should be a living, breathing thing that changes as laws change, as your situation changes, as your net worth changes. But for asset protection, that’s even more important.”

If a spouse begins showing signs of a terminal illness, the tenancy by the entireties protection will end at their death — restructuring may be warranted. If a marriage is struggling, a spouse with full access to jointly held assets becomes a risk. If net worth has grown substantially since the umbrella policy was last updated, coverage needs to be revisited.

For the Kennedy Space Center contractor, the Melbourne physician, and the Brevard County real estate investor listening to this — the right time to have this conversation is now, while everything is fine. Every month spent waiting is a month during which a single unexpected event could change everything.

What the First Conversation Looks Like

When clients contact Lacey Rezanka Attorneys at Law for an asset protection assessment, the first step is gathering foundational information: what are the assets, what are they worth, how are they titled, what are the current creditors, and what are the monthly obligations?

From there, the conversation turns to goals: How much control does the client want? How much administrative burden is acceptable? How close are they to retirement? What risks are they most concerned about?

The objective is never to make someone insolvent or to help them defraud legitimate creditors. It’s to use available legal tools to protect what can be protected — while keeping enough accessible to satisfy current obligations and demonstrate that the planning was done in good faith.

Take the First Step Before You Need To

If you’re a professional, real estate investor, or high-net-worth individual in Titusville, Rockledge, Viera, Melbourne, Suntree, Palm Bay, Malabar, Merritt Island, Cape Canaveral, Cocoa Beach, Satellite Beach, Indian Harbor Beach, Indialantic, Melbourne Beach, or anywhere in Brevard County, Indian River County, or Palm Beach County — and you’ve been putting off this conversation — the team at Lacey Rezanka Attorneys at Law is ready to help you build a plan that holds up.

Confidential asset protection assessments are available now.

Call (321) 608-0890 or schedule your consultation at llr.law/contact.

Don’t wait for a problem to find out where your gaps are.