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Self-Direct your Retirement.

A Step at Taking Control.

Can you

imagine using investments like real estate, precious metals or promissory notes

to get you that condo on the beach during retirement?

What if you could loan a close friend money from your IRA and secure the loan with a deed

of trust or what if you could help finance a local business, or help a local bank raise capital?

All of this is possible and takes place every day in self-directed IRAs.

What is a self-directed IRA?

A self-directed IRA is just an IRA that you, the accountholder, locate investments you wish to purchase. A self-directed IRA can be a Traditional, Roth, SEP, or SIMPLE IRA. You may be saying "I have a self-directed IRA already. It’s at my bank (or my broker or my mutual fund company)."

We see these all the time. The real question is: Is your IRA really self-directed?

It may be in the sense that you get to pick from a list of stocks and mutual funds into which you may invest, or, perhaps, you have an IRA at a brokerage that allows you to purchase any publicly traded stock.

That’s great! But it really isn’t self-directed. Ask you custodian if you can invest in real estate with your IRA. If the answer is no, your account is not really self-directed. It’s self-directed with limitations, substantial limitations.

A real self-directed IRA will allow you to hold a wide range of assets inside the account. You need a custodian that specializes in holding non-traditional assets as well as traditional assets.

There are custodians that will hold almost any type of investment or asset that you can imagine. I have seen people purchase everything from raw land to sporting event tickets. Most of these custodians exist in order to offer you the vehicle to use your retirement account to make investments that you are more comfortable with and understand. Please do not misunderstand me, if you understand stocks, bonds, and mutual funds you may be doing very well in the market. However, if you understand and are more comfortable with real estate, promissory notes, or business start-ups, you are in need of a real self-directed retirement account.

The first step is up to you. These custodians are located around the country. You do not need to have an office in your town in order to take full advantage of their services. Locate them, call them, e-mail, them, ask them anything that you can possibly think of. Find out which one is willing to provide you the service that you expect. While they are not likely to tell you if your investment choice is a good idea, they will or should be willing and able to talk to you about a few things.

First, they will be able to let you know if there is anything that needs to be further investigated based on the details of the transaction. These firms are not your legal advisers, but they do have a good working knowledge of the IRS code and they can usually pick up very quickly if you may be exploring an investment that would disqualify your account.

Second, they will be able to let you know what the process will be for setting the investment up in their system and they will be able to tell you what will need to be provided in order to determine if your investment is something that they will be able to administer. Do not be discouraged if the company you selected is not able to hold it, there are more companies, keep up the search.

Take the first step forward in taking complete control of your financial future. Locate a provider of self-directed IRA accounts and begin to discuss your investment options today!

Are changes coming?

I recently discovered that there is an attempt to add another exemption to the early withdrawl penalty for the Traditional IRA. A bill, H.R. 5318, was recently introduced that would allow an indiviudal to withdrawl funds from their Traditional IRA and that meets certain criteria for investment into small business would not be subject to the 10% early withdrawl penalty.

If you wanted the money to invest into a business that your IRA could not hold this could be a option to research. However, you may want to research making the small business investment within your IRA by using a self-directed account and keep the funds in the account to continue to grow for your retirement.

Bo
www.getmyra.com