What is asset protection?

Many people dream of becoming wealthy, but what they don’t realize is that once they’ve attained a significant number of assets, it’s not a trivial task to protect them.

In the financial world, asset protection means using strategies to guard your wealth from seizure or other forms of loss.

In a very practical sense,asset protection includes these basic steps:

Cataloguing your assets in a secure environment
Tracking your assets
Applying technical, financial, legal or other means to protect your assets in a case of an unforeseen event

Financial service companies can offer features such as estate planning, offshore trusts, and irrevocable trusts, but these often represent the basic minimum that asset owners need to fulfil the goal of asset protection.

Who is it for? and in which Life Situations?

Asset protection was rarely needed 100 years ago when people rarely had more than a bank account, life insurance, and real estate properties. And these were the very privileged few – even these assets, so common nowadays, were unthinkable for the majority of the population 100 and more years ago.

Today, things are quite different. Many people have diverse and complex assets, often in multiple countries. Tech companies give stock options or RSUs to their employees, expats have assets in multiple countries, and more and more people invest in stocks and buy cryptocurrencies.

Asset protection is usually needed when you fulfil most of the criteria below:

Multiple asset types

You have multiple types of assets – life insurance, bank accounts, stock options, company stocks, cryptocurrencies, real estate, to list a few. This increases the complexity of asset tracking for the owner, and especially for the beneficiaries.

Multiple countries

Your assets reside in more than one country. This situation is particularly familiar to expats. When they move from country to country, they usually leave a bank account here, life insurance or a pension fund there. This further complicates the asset tracking and, as a result, increases the need for asset protection.

Family members in different countries

Your family members live in a country different from the country where your assets are stored. For example, you live in the US and your assets are there, but your family members are in South America, Europe or Asia. This makes asset identification and location especially challenging for the family members.

Most common risks for your assets

Before talking about asset protection, we must step back and see which are the biggest risks related to asset loss.

We are not talking about risks related to asset management, e.g., investing in stocks, but risks related to losing assets even when they are in a passive state, for example, real estate, bank accounts, insurance policies, etc.

Typical risks related to your assets:

financial crisis (assets lose value sharply)
theft (assets are stolen via fraudulent transfer or other means)
forgetting about an asset (e.g., an old bank account or insurance policy)
heirs not being able to identify and locate assets in the event of the death of the owner

The risks fall into two groups. The first is related to external events or actions (fraud or financial crisis), and the second is the result of personal events or actions – death, forgetting about an asset, etc.

Types of asset protection

These are the most common asset protection tools:

• Asset protection trusts
• insurance policies
• family limited partnerships (FLP)

Using these tools requires a lot of time and effort. But apart from that, you will notice that the most common asset protection tools target primarily external risks. They fall short when it comes to personal risks.

Most common protection techiques

So how do people protect their assets from these personal risks, for example, forgetting about an asset or heirs not being able to locate an asset? Here are the most common protection techniques:

storing a list of assets on the hard drive of your computer
printing the list on paper and storing it in a secure place
using a digital vault
storing the information on Excel or Google Sheets.

You can’t fail to notice that while the protection tools relating to external risks are quite sophisticated, the tools used to protect your assets from personal risks are all over the place. And, most importantly, they fail to cover against some very important internal risks:

• These options fall short if anything were to happen to you AND your partner together.
• The people with whom you share the information about your assets might forget how to access it. Or they might be too young or too old to remember the access instructions.
• And most importantly, they don’t give you the option to allow access ONLY if something happens to you, not before.

How big is the problem of protecting your assets from these risks? It’s huge. So-called unclaimed assets approach $100B in the US alone. Latest reports for the UK show £77B. Globally, we are talking about trillions of dollars. And the upward trend is alarming – a $5B increase per year just in the USA.

How does DGLegacy’s asset protection work?

With the DGLegacy application, you can protect your personal assets against unforeseen events. You can connect your preferred beneficiary with your preferred assets, at the time you choose – while ensuring they get the support they need in the process of claiming.

This way, in the event of anything unforeseen happening to you, your loved ones:

Are aware of your assets
Can identify and locate your assets
Can minimize the chance of unclaimed assets.

This is achieved with the following easy steps:

Catalog assets

Assign beneficiaries and trustees

Heartbeat protocol

Heartbeat protocol triggering (unforeseen event detection)

Support for your loved ones

Catalog assets

You catalog the assets that you want to protect via DGLegacy, providing the minimum basic information about the assets that will allow your beneficiaries to identify and locate them.

DGLegacy doesn’t ask for confidential information such as your bank account number, the value of your stock options, or financial account numbers!

Next step

Assign beneficiaries and trustees

Beneficiaries are the people whom you appoint to be informed about the assets that you assign to them. These are usually your partner, your children or your extended family members, such as siblings and parents.

You might not want to share your asset information with your beneficiaries just yet. No problem. You can choose whether they are to be notified at the time you create the asset or only in the case of an unforeseen event.

If your beneficiaries are, for example, elderly people or children, they might not be proficient with the type of assets assigned to them. In that case, you can assign trustees for each of your assets in the DGLegacy application. If anything happens to you, they can help the beneficiaries to locate their assigned assets and claim ownership.

Next step

Configure your Heartbeat protocol

The custom-engineered Heartbeat protocol of DGLegacy verifies that you are OK and detects whether anything unforeseen has happened to you.

It is a safe procedure which also aims to eliminate the possibility of false detections of unforeseen events. This is implemented through a multistep process, described on the How It Works page.

Next step

Heartbeat protocol triggering (unforeseen event detection)

If there is no confirmation in response to any of the reminder emails or phone calls, the system detects that an unforeseen event has happened to you.

Then the notifications which you have configured into the system about the cataloged assets and the associated beneficiaries and trustees are triggered.

Next step

Support for your loved ones

Our ultimate goal is to provide you with the right service to protect your assets and secure your loved ones’ inheritance.

Our team of experts worked with a renowned law firm to offer additional protection for your loved ones through the legal package “Guide and Inform”, part of the Platinum subscription.

In the case of an unforeseen event, the law company will engage with the beneficiaries to guide and help them in the process of claiming the assets you’ve assigned to them.

With the DGLegacy application, you can protect your loved ones and secure your assets when it matters the most.

Find out how it works