Is a website/domain name an asset or a liability?
"This depends on your definitions of assets and liabilities. The word ""asset"" has a fairly straight forward definition.  Generally speaking, an asset in finance is something that you own/control that has economic value.  The asset has value because it is generating income for you or because you expect that it will be worth something to someone in the future. ""Liability"" is tougher to define, and depends on context.  In accounting, a liability is a debt or obligation that is owed.  It is essentially the opposite of an asset; where an asset represents something of value that you own, increasing your balance sheet, a liability is a value that you owe, decreasing your balance sheet. In that sense, a website or domain name that you own is an asset, not a liability, because it is something you own that has some value.  It is not a debt. Many people use the word ""liability"" informally to refer to a bad asset: something that is losing value or is causing more in expenses than it is generating in income.  (See definition #5 on Wiktionary.)  With this definition, you might consider a website or a domain name a liability if it is losing money. Alternatively, depending on your business, you might not consider it an asset or a liability, but an expense instead.  An expense is a cost of doing business.  For example, if your business is selling something, you might need a website to make that happen.  The website isn't purchased as an investment, and it might not have any value apart from your business.  It is simply a necessary expense for your business." In an accounting position, a domain name would fall under an intangible asset. Copyrights and patents are intangible, while tangible assets would be buildings or land (also known as property, plant, and equipment).  Noting above, you can list it as an expense for personal reasons, but that would be poor classification. Tangible and intangible assets come with expenses such as legal fees and design. In these instances, you would expense the cost, or fee, but add back that value to the tangible or intangible as it would be considered maintenance.  Please read here for tax treatment of a domain name.  Please read here for what an intangible asset is. Also read here on page 11 for more clarification by IFRS.
You need to first visit the website of whatever state you're looking to rent the property in and you're going to want to form the LLC in that particular state. Find the Department of Licensing link and inquire about forming a standard LLC to register as the owner of the property and you should easily see how much it costs. If the LLC has no income history, it would be difficult for the bank to allow this without requiring you to personally guarantee the loan. The obvious benefit of protecting yourself with the LLC is that you protect any other personal assets you have in your name. Your liability would stop at the loan.  The LLC would file its own taxes and be able to record the income against the losses (i.e. interest payments and other operating expenses.). This is can be beneficial depening on your current tax situation. I would definitely recommend the use of a tax accountant at that point.  You need to be sure you can really afford this property in the worst case scenario and think about market leasing assumption, property taxes, maintenance and management (especially if you've moved to another state.) It is a Scam. Don't invest more money here. Their website is the proof. Investments may appreciate or depreciate and you may not receive more   than you initially invested. The Peterson Group offers products that   are traded on margin and entail a degree of risk. You may incur losses   that exceed your initial investment. Please ensure you are aware of   and fully understand the risks involved, and seek independent advice   if necessary. Losses exceeding your initial investments does not sound a good investment even if it is not a scam. Not much contact information. Their contact page has only a form. No email. No phone number. No social media links. I would like to point some information from Dumbcoder's answer, Just browsed their website. Not a single name of anybody involved.   Their application process isn't safe(No https usage while transferring   private information). No names of the person's involved is a thing to notice. All the companies websites name their owner, CEO and the like. A company is basically divided into shit the company owns (assets) and shit the company owes to people (liabilities). So what about ownership? Ownership is called equity and on a simplistic level equity = asset - liabilities. But a better view of that should be asset = liabilities + equity. Which means a company's assets  is separated into things owned by debtors (e.g. Banks) and things owned by owners(founders and you). So when you are offered one percent, you are basically owning one percent of the company.   Not the best explanation, but should be a simplified one.   Here's where the options come in. When you are offered options. That means you have the option of redeeming the shares at a lower price than market. However these options are not usually immediately redeemable, there's usually a minimum amount of time you have to work at a company to be able to use these options. This period is called the vesting period. "From the HLSS 1st quarter 10Q: ""Match funded advances on loans serviced for others result from our transfers of residential loan servicing advances to SPEs in exchange for cash. The SPEs issue debt supported by collections on the transferred advances. We made these transfers under the terms of our advance facility agreements. These transfers do not qualify for sale accounting because we retain control over the transferred assets. As a result, we account for these transfers as financings and classify the transferred advances on our Interim Condensed Consolidated Balance Sheet as Match funded advances and the related liabilities as Match funded liabilities. We use collections on the Match funded advances pledged to the SPEs to repay principal and to pay interest and the expenses of the entity. Holders of the debt issued by this entity can look only to the assets of the entity itself for satisfaction of the debt and have no recourse against HLSS.""   I'm not an expert in the accounting of these things but I'll take a stab from the view of a bond investor.  Let's assume the mortgage(s) in question have been pooled together and sold into the bond market in the form of a mortgage-backed security (MBS).    When a homeowner falls behind on their payment, scheduled principal and interest (their monthly mortgage payment amount, or ""P&amp;I"") is advanced as if the borrower is still current to the person who holds the MBS.  This is typically done from the time they first fall behind until either they 1) catch up on their payments or, 2) are foreclosed upon and the home is sold to repay the mortgage balance.  In either instance the advanced monthly payments are recaptured by the servicer before the holder of the MBS is paid.  In this sense, the servicer develops a sort of prepaid asset over time by advancing money they are almost certain to recover at a future date (usually via foreclosure and liquidation).    Due to a high number of borrowers falling behind on their payments since the housing crisis and the resulting time it takes to foreclose on a property, the servicers (OCN, HLSS, etc.) have built a large balance of advances on the asset side of their balance sheet.  To free up this cash prior to liquidation of the home, they have sold short term bonds against this asset (via an SPE), thereby creating the liability you reference.  So in essence they have, say, a home they expect to be liquidated in twelve months that they have advanced P&amp;I on.  The short term bonds sold via the SPE offset this asset at an equivalent term, thereby making the asset and liability ""match funded""." "Asset = Equity + (Income - Expense) + Liability Everything could be cancelled out in double entry accounting.  By your logic, if the owner contributes capital as asset, Equity is ""very similar"" to Asset.  You will end up cancelling everything, i.e. 0 = 0.  You do not understate liability by cancelling them with asset.  Say you have $10000 debtors and $10000 creditors. You do not say Net Debtors = $0 on the balance sheet.  You are challenging the fundamental concepts of accounting.  Certain accounts are contra accounts. For example, Accumulated Depreciation is Contra-Asset. Retained Loss and Unrealized Revaluation Loss is Contra-Equity." "We *are* talking at cross-purposes, but not for the reason you think.   The debt might or might not be legally or practically recoverable (the apple-farmer and everything he owns might have been destroyed in the fire), but the value created and destroyed was real, and so was the money.   You're focusing on the debt owed to the shoemaker, which is fine, but your mistake is thinking that the debt is in some way meaningfully different from money, which it's not.   Most people who try to explain this difference would go off on a spiel about how the overwhelming majority of money on deposit in banks and otherwise in circulation has never been printed, or something, which is okay, but it's not a very convincing argument because you'll come back with something like, ""But I can still withdraw all my money, I can still cash all my checks, etc...""  So instead, I'm going to try and break this down, bear with me...  The apple-grower got a deer (worth 12 loddars, let's set the ""interest"" part aside for the moment). I got a pair shoes (also worth loddars).  Forget about the shoe-maker and the debt for a moment, and focus on me. I sold a deer, and I used the proceeds to buy a pair of shoes.   - Did I defraud anyone? No, I engaged in a fair transaction with willing partners on both sides.   - Did I get paid for the deer? Obviously I did, because I used the payment to buy shoes.   - What did I get paid with, if not money?   I can hear you saying ""yeah, but the shoe guy...""   Forget about the shoe guy. When buy something on Amazon marketplace and charge it on a credit card and then get paid via direct-deposit and then have the money taken from your account to pay off the credit-card company electronically, is all of that real money? Of course it is.   Now, what happens if you die before paying the the credit-card bill? Does that mean that the money Amazon paid to the seller doesn't exist?  Does that mean that money paid by the CC company to Amazon doesn't exist? How about the money in your bank account, does that exist? What if your employer once defrauded someone, how about then?   None of that money has ever been *printed*, nobody got permission from Ben Bernanke to authorize these transactions, but the money that changed hands was absolutely real, even though it was nothing more than a *series of promises.*   Before you argue with me, think this through: all these account-transfers ultimately boil down to *promises* by the end bank to produce cash when and if the account-holder walks up to a teller and demands it. The bank doesn't have nearly enough cash to pay every account-holder, but they *do* have enough (hopefully) to keep their promises, since they know they won't all be called in at once.   Nobody ever actually delivered a package of paper currency to cover these transactions. Everyone is just trading promises, and passing those promises along to others. It sounds crazy to say it that way, but it is *absolutely* true.   Tally up your net worth (or if that's too ugly, imagine tallying up someone's net worth who has a net worth). Chances are that you have never in your life seen that amount of paper cash, certainly not in your physical possession. So who has it? It's not like your local bank branch has a box marked ""C_B_M"" with $400,000 in bills and coins sitting there.   What you have is a series of promises.   When your employer gets by credit-card, the customer promises to pay the credit-card company, who promises to pay your employer's bank. Your employer then pays you with a direct-deposit whereby his bank promises to pay your bank. You then swipe an ATM card and your bank promises to pay the grocery-store's bank, who in turn sends a check to their supplier which is a promise that the grocery-store's bank will pay the supplier's bank, who in turn does the same with the farmer, who does the same with his mortgage-company, who does the same to their investors, who do the same to whoever they spend money with.   Occasionally one of them takes a cash withdrawal to tip the stripper or stick in a birthday-card or buy hot-dogs at the ballpark or something, but overwhelmingly, we are all just spending and re-spending *promises*, and the remarkable thing is that, overwhelmingly, *we keep them*, without anyone involved ever hiring a truck to deliver a bindle of cash to the ""first person"" because there *is* no ""first person.""  All of that stuff is *absolutely real money*.   I used the example of a wildfire, but maybe it will be more useful to think of something that just changes in value for no obvious reason. Think of some article of clothing that has gone out of style-- everyone was buying that stuff up until the day they stopped. Somewhere, someone was stuck with the last warehouse full of hot-pink parachute pants or whatever. A month before, when they were ordered from China or wherever, they were worth $50 each. Now you can't give them away. That value is gone, it's just vanished. The money that bought the pants was real, the pants are real, but they are no longer worth anything.   The person holding that warehouse full of pants now has to *pay* to either store of dispose of them. They might start bouncing checks and breaking promises. There was no fraud, but there also might not be any way to recover the money owed. $10mm worth of parachute pants is now negative $1mm worth of trash that has to be disposed of and mortgage obligations on the warehouse.   I hope some of that makes sense. It is really hard to explain this stuff via analogy and hypothetical and the kinds of terms that lawyers think in, if you will forgive me for saying so." Based on what you've said I think buying a rental is risky for you. It looks like you heard that renting a house is profitable and Zillow supported that idea. Vague advice + a website designed for selling + large amounts of money = risky at the very least. That doesn't mean that rental property is super risky it just means that you haven't invested any time into learning the risks and how you can manage them. Once you learn that your risk reduces dramatically. In general though I feel that rental property has a good risk/reward ratio. If you're willing to put in the time and energy to learn the business then I'd encourage you to buy property. If you're not willing to do that then rentals will always be a crap shoot. One thing about investing in rental property is you have the ability to have more impact on your investment than you do dropping money in the stock market which is good and bad. "Technical people on Reddit who have dealt with Oracle or similar web sites &amp; systems (myself included) seem to believe that Oregon's claims come down to whether it was Oracle or the state government who was worse at planning the creation and maintenance of Oregon's healthcare web site.  I tend to think that government entities are often worse at managing &amp; planning things, and therefore believe that Oracle would be less likely to blame, but this doesn't necessarily mean that all of the more than dozen claims for damages will all be thrown out either.  One key claim is that Oracle asserted that ~95% of the web site's functionality would work ""out of the box"", thus leaving only 5% of the web site's functionality requiring third party (potentially custom) integration.  The burden is on Oregon to prove that the failures of the web site were the result of more than that 5%, and that Oracle was contractually obligated to fix issues with the ""&gt;5%"" at no additional charge.  Failure to prove that would result in Oracle being justified in asking for more $ to fix the web site, such that the alleged racketeering and much of the fraud did not actually take place."