Missouri asset protection: a strong charging order that rests on a single 2015 opinion, not on the statute

Missouri looks like a strong charging-order state, and it reaches the strong result, but not the way the strong states do. The statute, RSMo 347.119, never says the charging order is the exclusive remedy, and it never mentions foreclosure at all. What stops a creditor from foreclosing a member’s interest is not statutory language. It is a single 2015 Court of Appeals decision that read the statute’s silence to mean foreclosure was left out on purpose. The result protects the member. The foundation is one intermediate opinion, not the robust exclusive-remedy text that Wyoming or Delaware wrote into their codes.

That distinction is the thing to understand about Missouri protection, because a protection that rests on a court’s reading of silence is more fragile than one written into the statute, and no Missouri Supreme Court decision has confirmed it. The rest of the picture has a clearer strength: the homestead exemption is tiny, and about to rise, but it was never the real shield. The real shield is how a married couple holds property, and Missouri’s version of that is unusually broad. Take the charging order first.

The charging order that the statute does not describe

Start with what a personal creditor gets against your Missouri LLC stake. The general mechanics are on the charging order protection page. Missouri’s version is strong in result and thin in text.

Missouri’s charging order gives a creditor only the rights of an assignee, but the statute never calls it exclusive and never addresses foreclosure.

RSMo 347.119 lets a court charge a member’s interest with a judgment, and it says the creditor “has only the rights of an assignee of the member’s interest,” which means the distributions the member would have received. That is the ordinary charging-order floor. What Missouri’s statute does not contain is the language the strong states rely on: it does not say the charging order is the exclusive remedy, and it does not say a creditor may or may not foreclose the interest. On the text alone, a creditor could argue foreclosure is available, the way it is against a partnership interest under Missouri’s partnership statutes.

The reason a creditor cannot is a court decision, not the code.

A creditor cannot foreclose a Missouri LLC interest only because a 2015 Court of Appeals held the statute’s silence was a deliberate omission.

In DiSalvo Properties, LLC v. Bluff View Commercial, LLC, 464 S.W.3d 243 (Mo. App. E.D. 2015), the Eastern District held that because 347.119 does not affirmatively authorize foreclosure, foreclosure is not available. The court reasoned that the legislature knew how to authorize foreclosure, because it did so in the partnership statutes, and its omission from the LLC act must have been intentional. That is a sound reading, and it puts Missouri on the strong side of the line. But it is worth being precise about what protects the member: an intermediate appellate court’s interpretation of a gap, not an exclusive-remedy provision the legislature enacted. No Missouri Supreme Court decision has adopted it, and the single-member case, where the policy reasons for the charging order are weakest, has not been tested. The single-member LLC page covers that soft spot generally; in Missouri it sits on top of a protection that is judicial rather than statutory.

The veil, and the insurance that helps hold it

To reach the owner directly, a creditor must pierce the veil, and Missouri’s test contains a point most owners never connect to their insurance decision.

Missouri pierces the veil on control, wrongful use of that control, and proximate cause, and undercapitalization alone can supply the wrongful-use element.

Under 66, Inc. v. Crestwood Commons Redevelopment Corp., 998 S.W.2d 32 (Mo. banc 1999), a creditor must show three things: complete domination of the entity so it had no separate mind or existence of its own, use of that control to commit a fraud or wrong or violate a legal duty, and that the control and wrong proximately caused the injury. The same test applies to LLCs. What makes Missouri notable is the second element: drawing on Collet v. American National Stores, Missouri courts treat undercapitalization itself, running the company with assets far below what the business obviously needs, as a wrong that can satisfy the standard. So an owner who starves the company of capital has handed a creditor the middle element.

Here is the seam, and it turns an insurance decision into a veil-piercing defense.

Adequate liability insurance can defeat an undercapitalization theory in Missouri, so coverage does double duty: it pays claims and it rebuts the pierce.

In Radaszewski v. Telecom Corp., applying Missouri law, the court held that a company was properly capitalized because it carried an insurance policy sized to its foreseeable liabilities, which defeated the claim that it was undercapitalized. The lesson is concrete and cross-cuts two things owners usually keep separate. Liability insurance is not only the thing that pays a claim so it never reaches the entity’s assets. In Missouri it is also the fact that answers a creditor arguing the entity was too thinly capitalized to respect. Carrying coverage appropriate to the business does both jobs at once, which is why the site’s insurance-first position is not just risk management here; adequate coverage is part of what keeps the veil intact. The owner who runs a rental or an operating company on minimal capital and no insurance is exposed on both fronts, and the fix for both is the same policy.

Two homesteads worth, one of them about to change

The homestead does not carry the load in Missouri, and the number is moving.

Missouri’s judgment homestead exemption is $15,000 through the end of 2026 and rises to $40,000 on January 1, 2027, with no doubling for a married couple.

For asset protection the relevant figure is the exemption in RSMo 513.475, which protects home equity against a money judgment, and it has been $15,000 since 2003, among the lowest in the country, and it does not double for spouses. In 2026 the legislature raised it: under HB 1870, the exemption becomes $40,000 in the aggregate effective January 1, 2027, with an inflation adjustment every three years starting in 2029. So a page relying on a single number would be wrong within months, and the accurate statement is $15,000 now, $40,000 on January 1, 2027. Even at $40,000 it is modest, so the increase helps but does not make the homestead the centerpiece of a Missouri plan. Confirm the current figure before relying on it, because the effective date and the amount are both recent.

The entireties that carry the marital shield

For a married couple, Missouri’s real protection comes from titling, and it is broader than most states allow.

Missouri recognizes tenancy by the entireties in personal property as well as real, including bank accounts, so entireties reaches assets a homestead never touches.

Missouri courts recognize entireties ownership in both real and personal property, and property held that way is beyond a creditor of only one spouse, though not a creditor of both on a joint debt. Because personal property counts, a married couple’s bank account held as entireties can be protected against one spouse’s creditor, and a jointly held LLC membership interest, which is personal property, can in principle be entireties property beyond that creditor’s reach, a theory available in Missouri in a way it is not in a real-property-only state like Indiana. That breadth is why the marital shield here runs through entireties, not the thin homestead. The full doctrine, including the joint-debt exception and the federal-tax-lien rule under United States v. Craft, is on the entireties page. The courts page explains why where a judgment is enforced can matter as much as where the law is favorable.

The bottom line

Missouri’s charging order gives a creditor only assignee rights under RSMo 347.119, and it reaches the strong no-foreclosure result, but through DiSalvo v. Bluff View (2015), not through an exclusive-remedy statute.

Because the protection is judicial, not statutory, it is untested in the Missouri Supreme Court and unsettled for single-member LLCs.

Veil piercing under 66, Inc. turns on control, wrongful use, and causation, and undercapitalization can supply the wrongful use, but adequate liability insurance can defeat that theory, so coverage protects on two fronts at once.

The judgment homestead exemption is $15,000 through 2026 and rises to $40,000 on January 1, 2027 under HB 1870, still modest and with no spousal doubling.

The real marital shield is tenancy by the entireties, which Missouri recognizes broadly in real and personal property, so the plan here is to hold jointly as entireties, carry real insurance, and understand the charging order rests on case law.

What this page does not cover

This page is about how creditors reach you in Missouri. What Missouri’s law lets your operating agreement do, and the statute that commands you to have one, is on the governance page. Missouri’s capital gains exemption, the series LLC, and the absence of any transfer tax are on the structure and cost page. The $50 formation fee and the fact that Missouri requires no annual report at all are on the filing page.

Last verified August 2026.