| Company LLC/personal and umbrella insurance We have two autos and a personal umbrella policy. Both autos are used extensively for business purposes, each one 90% according to our tax return at least. The 10% is to show some personal vehicle use since the IRS won’t believe 100% business use of all vehicles all of the time. One is titled/registered in the company name which is a single owner LLC. The other I just bought and apparently had to title in my personal name. The reason is that the insurance company said that at least one auto must be titled personally in order for the personal umbrella policy to remain valid. They were more vague about how the personal umbrella policy handles the company vehicle other than to say it needs to be under a corporate insurance policy, which is more expensive than a personal policy, and loses the multi-car discount as well. They seemed to indicate if a personal lawsuit arises from use of the company vehicle, then that personal lawsuit would be covered by the umbrella policy (no need to carry maximum liability coverage on the company vehicle in this case). So, one option is to correct the title/registration of the company vehicle back to personal (getting hit with minimum excise tax on the "sale" of the vehicle as well) and get everything correctly under the umbrella policy as personal. Another option is to keep it as it is now and take the hit on premium increases. I also thought that maybe we can lower the liability limits on the company vehicle since the company has no major assets other than the car itself, a token amount of furniture and some accounts receivable. The lowered premium may more than make up for the increase in a company policy and loss of multi-car discount. The reason is that everything under the umbrella policy has to be insured at the maximum allowed limits to have seamless coverage to the umbrella (for example, autos must carry $250,000/$500,000 liability insurance). If the company auto had limits like $20,000/$40,000, or whatever the lowest required limits are, there would still be coverage since the liability exposure is limited to the company assets, and an additional personal lawsuit should be covered by the personal umbrella policy. Am I missing something? If someone sues the company due to an auto accident by a company vehicle and wins above the liability insurance limits, can they garnish the single owner LLC's wages forever? Or can they only do a charging order and receive nothing because the company will elect to stop distributing profits after that (FYI - LLC is in the state of Illinois)? Does it matter who is driving at the time? Could that judgment continue even if the owner dissolved the LLC and started over again? |