Reed Scott is an attorney, who in addition to his law degree, has an MBA in finance and a master's in tax law. He has been a financial analyst for Ford Motor Corporation, and corporate counsel and president for a technology consulting company based in San Francisco. He is managing partner at a respected law firm in Northern California. His firm focuses on asset protection, tax and wealth planning for individuals and businesses. Reed was originally drawn to asset protection planning because he saw his clients spend years and often decades trying to accumulate wealth and avoid taxes only to lose everything due to unexpected circumstances and things that seemed outside of their control. After much research and experience he began to develop techniques for protecting families and businesses from the unexpected. He began showing people that what seems outside of our control doesn't have to be. After working with thousands of families it became clear that the entire estate planning industry was not serving modern families. The things that eat up modern family wealth have nothing to do with what most consumers expect. Reed wrote this book to save families from the devastating costs of poor traditional and outdated estate planning. Estate planning, in his opinion, is still about 100 years behind the times. Reed's law firm, Youngman Ericsson Scott, LLP, has over 9,000 clients in California, and provides a full range of services to business owners and families. He is a sought-after speaker who gives dynamic seminars on wealth planning and asset protection, and has educated thousands of business owners, professionals and consumers on estate planning, tax, and asset protection techniques. Reed has developed a system for protecting family wealth and helping to prevent the types of things that can lead to wealth erosion after the death of a first spouse or upon transfer to children. He also developed a system for building and protecting retirement accounts that he has implemented for hundreds of his clients, and written a separate book on that method (available at www.yesllp.com). Reed also wrote a nursing home guide for California that ex-plains how to qualify for financial assistance for nursing home costs without going broke, and provides a guide to and information on available nursing homes in California.