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The whirlwind of excitement and activity surrounding the launch of a startup can feel overwhelming. You’re so focused on managing the day-to-day logistics of getting your business up and running, you often don’t have time to focus on the bigger picture.

Because of this, it can be easy to overlook some perilous legal pitfalls that can turn your entrepreneurial dreams into a nightmare. Indeed, not having the proper legal protections in place is one of the biggest reasons startups fail. But with sound legal advice and planning, it’s fairly easy to safely sidestep these potential dangers.

While you should consult with us early and often during the startup phase, here are four of the most common legal landmines to watch out for:

Choosing the right legal structure for your business is crucial, not only for protecting your personal assets from liability, but also for boosting your income and saving on taxes. Whether its a sole proprietorship, limited liability company (LLC), or S-Corporation, each entity comes with unique advantages and disadvantages, all of which must be carefully considered before launching.

Consult with us for help choosing and setting up the business entity structure that’s best suited for your particular operation.

In a startup’s early days, it can be tempting to skip clearly documenting each co-founder’s responsibilities, rights, decision-making power, and equity. You’re all in this together, right? But if you don’t have a thorough founders’ agreement in place from the start, you risk major legal and financial conflicts down the road.

Such agreements should be in writing and created with the guidance of lawyers like us who specialize in business law. And they should be in place before you begin earning revenue. Once a business starts making money, you’ll often find your co-founders’ goals aren’t as closely aligned with yours as you first thought.

As with a founders’ agreement, you should also have comprehensive employment contracts in place for every person who works for you—both full-time employees and independent contractors. It doesn’t matter how long you’ve known the person, you should have an agreement in writing clearly laying out the terms and conditions of employment.

Require your workers to sign these contracts to provide evidence that both parties are aware of the employment relationship, especially when it comes to classifying employees versus independent contractors. These documents should also include any non-disclosure agreements and/or non-compete agreements you need to ensure your trade secrets and clients don’t fall into the hands of your competitors.

Protecting your intellectual property (IP) from outsiders and competitors by securing patents, trademarks, and copyrights is essential. But don’t forget to protect your IP from insiders as well.

Make sure that all intellectual property (IP) brought into your business by its founders before startup, along with any IP created by owners, employees, and/or contractors after its launch, is owned by the company, not the individual.

The transfer of ownership rights from the individual to the company can be done using IP assignment agreements and work-for-hire clauses. We can help you draft these agreements as well as put in place other legal protections to ensure you actually own all of the work you’re paying others to create.

Starting a business is hard enough without having to worry about costly legal problems hanging over your head. Begin by sitting down with us to ensure your company has the proper legal protections in place. Even if you’ve worked with another lawyer, we can review your existing documents to make sure they’re correct and up to date.

We offer a complete spectrum of legal services for business owners and can help you make the wisest choices on how to deal with your business throughout life and in the event of your death. We also offer you a LIFT Your Life And Business Planning Session, which includes a review of all the legal, insurance, financial, and tax systems you need for your business. Schedule online today.

Buying a second home can provide you with a place to relax, unwind, and escape from it all. It can also provide you with substantial savings if you take advantage of these tax benefits of buying a second home.

Mortgage interest paid on up to $1.1 million in debt on your first and second homes is fully deductible. Typically, this rule only applies if you treat your second home as a home and not a rental property. But some mortgage interest may still be deductible if you occasionally rent out your second home. To benefit from this deduction, you must use the property for 14 days or more than 10% of the number of days you rent it out a year, whichever is longer.

Retirement planning is one of life’s most important financial goals. Indeed, funding retirement is one of the primary reasons many people put money aside in the first place. Yet many of us put more effort into planning for our vacations than we do to prepare for a time when we may no longer earn an income.

Whether you’ve put off planning for retirement altogether or failed to create a truly comprehensive plan, you’re putting yourself at risk for a future of poverty, penny pinching, and dependence. The stakes could hardly be higher.

When preparing for your final years, it’s not enough to simply hope for the best. You should treat retirement planning as if your life depended on it—because it does. To this end, even well thought-out plans can contain fatal flaws you might not be aware of until it’s too late.

Have you committed any of the following three deadly sins of retirement planning?

Even if you’ve been diligent about saving for retirement, without a detailed, goal-oriented plan, you’ll have no clear idea whether your savings strategies are working adequately or not. And such plans aren’t just about calculating a retirement savings number, funding your 401(k), and then setting things on auto-pilot.

Once you know how much you’ll need for retirement, you have to plan for exactly how you’ll accumulate that money and monitor your success. The plan should include clear-cut methods for increasing income, reducing spending, maximizing tax savings, and managing investments when and where needed.

What’s more, you should regularly review and update your asset allocation, investment performance, and savings goals to ensure you’re still on track to hit your target figure. With each new decade of your life (at least), you should adjust your savings strategies to match the specific needs of your new income level and age.

The plan should also take into consideration unforeseen contingencies, such as downturns in the economy, health emergencies, layoffs, and inflation.

Failing to plan, as they say, is planning to fail.

One way or another, the money you put aside for retirement is going to be taxed. However, by investing in tax-saving retirement accounts, you can significantly reduce the amount of taxes you’ll pay.

Depending on your employment and financial situation, there are numerous different plans available. From traditional IRAs and 401(k)s to Roth IRAs and SEP Plans, you should consider using one or more of these investment vehicles to ensure you achieve the most tax savings possible.

What’s more, many employers will match your contributions to these accounts, which is basically free money. If your employer offers matching funds, you should not only use these accounts, but contribute the maximum amount allowed—and do so as early as possible.

Since figuring out which of these plans will offer the most tax savings can be tricky—and because tax laws are constantly changing—you should consult with us and a professional financial advisor to find the one(s) best suited for your particular situation. Paying taxes is unavoidable, but there’s no reason you should pay any more than you absolutely have to.

One of the most frequent mistakes people make when planning for retirement is assuming that things will always stay the same. Whether it’s tax laws, inflation, market conditions, or marital status, if you don’t carefully consider how your circumstances might change with time, you’re putting yourself and your savings at serious risk.

While many such contingencies are mere possibilities, the one thing that’s certain to change with time is your body and mind. It’s an inescapable fact that our health naturally declines with age, so one of the most risky things you can do is not plan for increased health-care expenses.

With many employers eliminating retiree health-care coverage, Medicare premiums rising, and the extremely volatile nature of health insurance law, planning for your future health-care expenses is absolutely critical. And it’s even more important seeing that we’re now living longer than ever before.

Plus, these considerations are assuming that you don’t fall victim to a catastrophic illness or accident. The natural aging process is expensive enough to manage, but a serious health-care emergency can wipe out even the most financially well off.

But with so many unknowns, how can you possibly prepare for every possible scenario?

The truth is, you can’t. That said, you should take advantage of every available precaution within your means. This might mean delaying retirement, purchasing supplemental insurance, investing in long-term care insurance, opening a Health Savings Account, or some combination of these options. We can advise you on precautions that are right for you and your family.

The best way to maximize your retirement funding is to start planning (and saving) as soon as possible. In fact, your retirement savings can be exponentially increased simply by starting to plan at an early age.

We don’t just draft documents; we ensure you make informed and empowered decisions about life and death, for yourself and the people you love. That’s why we offer a Family Wealth Planning Session, ™ during which you will get more financially organized than you’ve ever been before, and make all the best choices for the people you love. You can begin by calling our office today to schedule a Family Wealth Planning Session and mention this article to find out how to get this $750 session at no charge. Schedule online today.