A word of warning to my friends concerned with protecting privacy from a recent personal experience.

The specific details aren't so important but a friend called and needed a small amount of cash due to an unforeseen emergency. Under normal circumstances I would have gone in person to a Western Union agent and given them cash but in case you haven't noticed there have been 2 blizzards in my neighborhood in the past week. As a result, everything is closed including the multiple places within a short distance that I could have done business with a live agent and used cash.

Extremely begrudgingly I called Western Union and sent money using my credit card. I say "extremely begrudgingly" because I rarely use my credit card. I pay cash for almost everything. The only exceptions are airline tickets, hotel reservations, etc. To say the amount of personal information required for this transactions was excessive would be an understatement. For someone so protective of my privacy, I feel like I've been "raped."

The normal credit card information was not enough. They needed my DOB too. But that was just the beginning of my horror story. This was the first (and last) time I've used Western Union. I was told the funds would be available to my friend within 30 minutes but that was not the case. I don't know if the agent I spoke to lied to me or is just incompetent.

In any event, several hours later I had to call Western Union again. My transfer had been suspended until they could verify my identity. I can respect that we live in a world full of criminals so they need to take steps to protect themselves but I am not a criminal and it annoys the crap out of me that criminals have made this level of caution necessary.

They needed the last 4 of my SSN to pull some information from my credit file so they could give me a multiple choice test based on that information. But even that was not enough. The last step was to give them a telephone number they could call and I would answer.

Had I known the excessive amount of personal information required before hand, I would never have wired my friend money. I also made it crystal clear that I will NEVER do this again. I remember some words my mother used to say to me when I was a kid: "Failure to plan on your part does not create an emergency on my part."

Hopefully sharing this horror story saves someone else the hassle and frustration of dealing with Western Union.

... Wow, what a wise mother: "Failure to plan on your part does not create an emergency on my part." Readers, remember that one!

Here's a message for your friend:

Never leave home without some hundred-dollar bills on your person. Never! Never! NEVER!

The assets of each series can be bought and sold without affecting the assets of the other series.

Each series is part of one LLC so you would only pay to setup one LLC.

I would recomend that you have an attorney help you with this.

I am only familiar with Texas laws and Tennessee laws about series LLCs may be different but the concept is the same. It is like one corporation with several subsidiaries.

1. Do I need a separate LLC for each?

2. Is it possible to put them in one LLC but different cells so they are each protected on their own?

3. If one parcel of land was sold, how would this be handled?

4. Would I be paying for one LLC or two?

5. Do I need an attorney to do this?

Sorry for all the questions but the more I read about an LLC the more confusing it is.

... I numbered your many questions, to make it easier to answer.

1. Yes.

2. No.

3. Do not put both in one.

4. Two.

5. Probably not, but check with your title company first.

I have seen multiple online services with varying degrees of customer service,
www.luggageforward.com
www.luggageahead.com
www.luggageconcierge.com Fedex Ground, or USPS.

Any specific suggestion, anyone ?

Submitted Link #1: http://www.usps.com/communications/newsroom/localn...

... Personally, I use Priority Mail. (I'd never use FedEx since they share their information with the government.)

It would defeat that purpose to invite others to compete in finding me.

If others want to treat HTBI as a contest, that's fine with me: I might learn something from their failures.

The very fact that THEY have to know who you are compromises your privacy, because YOU can never know who THEY are going to give the info to. This is particularly since (as the Anonymizer situation reveals), such "let us secure your privacy, just tell us who you are" companies are all too often opened either by crooks, foreign agents, or our own security apparatchiks in order to keep tabs on people who aren't being good little compliant, complacent proletarians who don't complain about Nanny Government watching their every move.

People who value privacy and liberty make spooks and cops suspicious, and they like to keep track of such people. How do you think Randy Weaver ended up with his wife and son dead?

The key to maintaining privacy is to drop off the radar and STAY THERE, or possibly create a plausible "persona" that acts like a good little proletarian, though that is MUCH harder to do.

And you can't drop under the radar if some on-line business knows who you are and where you live, because if they know, the three-letter agencies they likely work for certainly know. That's why such businesses are bad business models. People are smarter than that.

Early press coverage has been uniformly positive. CNN.com's review says "Total digital privacy may be on the horizon." The San Francisco Chronicle's article is titled "Online disguises from prying eyes." To BusinessWeek, it's a "A big boost for Net privacy."

"Think about how much business is predicated on the flow of personal information!" one of the founders predicts. "If you need to add privacy as a foundation under all of that, what is that industry worth? It's huge. Billions and billions and billions."

The year was 2000, and the company was named Zero Knowledge Systems

Which sounds exactly like what ZKS tried, and failed, to convince the public was a good idea. And it's not just one company: a 2001 article in The Atlantic rattles off a list of companies that were hoping to attract privacy-sensitive Internet users. The list includes IDcide (dead), PrivacyX (defunct), American Express' Private Payments (ditto), and Disappearing.com (you guessed it).

The Atlantic article mentions ZipLip, founded to protect e-mail privacy; now, under the name ZL Technologies, it offers innovative ways to "find relevant information hidden in massive volumes of data" for legal discovery processes. Anonymizer.com was founded by cypherpunk Lance Cottrell to provide privacy-protective Web surfing to the public for a reasonable fee. It's now part of Abraxas Corporation, a northern Virginia firm that shares its name with a comic book villain and has close ties to the CIA and FBI. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which once enthusiastically recommended Anonymizer.com, says it no longer does because of Abraxas' links to the U.S. national security apparatus.

Submitted Link #1: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-10443575-38.html...