The personal guarantee

The loan is the LLC’s problem. The guaranty is yours. It is the one document in the closing stack that reaches past the entity and touches the person who signed it, and it is the reason a failed deal can take a house that was never part of the deal. Everything else in a loan file governs the company. This governs you.

The guaranty is the only instrument in the loan built to survive the LLC. Read it as the document that reaches you, because that is exactly what it is.

A personal guaranty is a separate promise: if the borrowing entity does not pay, the guarantor will, out of personal assets. Lenders require it on most small and mid-market commercial real estate debt precisely because the LLC shield works, the borrowing entity is often empty by design, so the guaranty is how the lender reaches something that is not empty.

This section takes the guaranty apart. What it waives and why that is not the same as losing your LLC in court. Whether it covers the whole debt or only defined bad acts. Whether the lender can come for you first or must exhaust the borrower. Whether it shrinks as the deal proves out. Whether a spouse can be pulled in, which is unsettled law. And what happens to it after the entity is gone, which is the whole point of it. Each is a term you control before you sign and cannot touch after.

The six pages are below, in the order they matter when you read a guaranty.