2325: Unlock Tax-Free Wealth: Mastering the Self-Directed Roth IRA Like Peter Thiel with Adam Bergman

This show is produced by the Hartman Media Company. For more information and links to all our great podcasts, visit hartmanmedia.com.

My name is Brad, I live in Central Florida. I'm here in Southern California for Jason's Empowered Investor event. This is my first event here, although I have been on his two of his Mastermind yacht adventures which have both been amazing. But but yeah, this event, man, it makes me feel like investing in real estate. We've gotten so much great information this weekend from asset protection to how to manage properties. It's just a wealth of knowledge at this event here this weekend. So if you're thinking about coming to this event, I would highly recommend it. You're going to get a wealth of knowledge whether you're a first time real estate investor to a seasoned experienced real estate investor, there's always something you're going to pick up from an event like this and and we hope to see you next time.

Welcome to the Creating wealth show with Jason Hartman. You're about to learn a new slant on investing, some exciting techniques and fresh new approaches to the world's most historically proven asset class that will enable you to create more wealth and freedom than you ever thought possible. Jason is a genuine, self made multimillionaire who's actually been there and done it. He's a successful investor, lender, developer and entrepreneur whose own properties in 11 states, had hundreds of tenants and been involved in thousands of real estate transactions. This program will help you follow in Jason's footsteps on the road to your financial Independence Day. You really can do it. And now, here's your host, Jason Hartman with the complete solution for real estate investors.

She calls America evil from her iPhone while sipping Starbucks on an airplane with wi fi while watching tv she drinks oat milk because regular milk makes her feel colonial. She got eight Covid shots, still caught it and blamed the unvaccinated waiter. She has a Ukraine flag in her bio. She thinks Ukraine is a clothing brand. She says black lives matter but still clutches her bag in certain neighborhoods. She used to be vegan, now she's carnivore. Depends on who she's dating. She thinks all cops are bad, then called the cops because someone wasn't wearing a mask. She says she's a feminist until she needs a jar opened. She says trust the science but thinks there's more than two genders. She got the booster, then posted a selfie with doing my part while spreading Covid in Tulum. She drinks ayahuasca for trauma she invented last year. She says she hates capitalism but charges $499 for Zoom breathwork. She posts about toxic masculinity from her ex's apartment. She is the most conformist woman in the world.

I don't always drink, but when I do, it's from an organic coconut with a biodegradable strawberry. Stay obedient, my friends.

Greetings, empowered investors. Thank you for joining me today and welcome to episode 2325. We've got a great show for you today. Our guest will be talking about self directed IRAs. So if you're looking for some tips and strategies to optimize your IRA and make it self directed, this show is definitely for you. And we'll get to that in just a few moments. But a big concept for today and a big thought for today. I saw this point made the other day in one of my newsletters and it says, get your dopamine from action. We all now, in the era of social media, understand how dopamine works and how that's the little high we get from doing certain things and how casinos manipulate our dopamine and social media websites manipulate our dopamine receptors to make us do more of what they want. And that can definitely be dangerous. But here is a good concept. Get your dopamine from action rather than getting it from information gathering. Okay, Dopamine from information gathering is a dangerous drug. Your entire life will change the moment you stop looking for more information and you start acting on the information you already have. Look, I don't have to tell anybody, but we all know, whether we admit it or not, that life and the rewards of life and all the good things belong to those who take action. And that there is literally wisdom in action. And I don't mean that like a cliche, I mean that like a fact. There is wisdom in action. Life is on the job training. We will never have all the information before doing anything. We gotta just go out and do it and learn as we go. That's just the way the world works. But we are always here to support all of you empowered investors in taking action. So reach out to our team. Of course, you can do that at 1-800-HARTMAN. Just press 2, extension 2 you'll get with our investment counseling team and they can help you with your action plan. All right, so let's look at some appreciation rates. And this is for a 10 year period from 2014 to 2024. All of this data, remember, always varies a little bit depending on the survey. And this is purchases and this is the FHFA house price index. HBI survey. Okay. It's seasonally adjusted and it's nominal comparing Q2 data. So second quarter data of each year. Now you see how that could skew things, right? What if you compared the first quarter or the last quarter data? Right. That would change the numbers because we all know that in most places around the country, the second quarter is when real estate is the most active. I would always say when I was in traditional real estate, my busiest month was always April. April was the month where I made the most money. And the other months were all right, but April was definitely the busiest month. So this is Q2 comparisons. And I just want to point that out because when you look at different surveys and you look at different time frames, everything can change a bit. It won't change too dramatically, but it will definitely change a bit. So back to second quarter of 2014, 4.7% appreciation. We saw that about the same 5.1% 2015, 5.4% 2016. And then it goes up a little bit. 2017 and 18, probably the Trump bump from the first Trump term, 6.2%. Then it calms down a little bit in 2019. Remember that was right before COVID 2020, 5.7%. And then it is off the charts. Where we see appreciation in 2021 at 17.4%. When all of the Doomers and the Crash Bros. Said the sky was falling. But they were completely wrong and they caused lots of people to miss out on incredible opportunities during the COVID era. And then the following year, 2022, over 17% appreciation. Then it calms down, we see prices have gone way up, housing affordability is not good and interest rates go up. 2023, only 3.2%. And then last year 5.7%. And this year we're going to be lower than that. I'm going to call that early. We're only halfway through the year, but I think we will be significantly lower than 5.7% this year. Okay, but again, keep your eye on the ball. Don't make this all about prices. I know the Crash Bros. And the Doomers always talk about housing prices. But what they forget is that income property is this beautiful multidimensional asset class. The most historically proven asset class in the entire world and the most tax favored asset class in America. And it is about yield more than price appreciation. But hey, that price appreciation, it is the frosting on the cake. And sometimes that frosting can be wonderful and delicious. We all know that. So let's talk about renters and why it is so hard for renters to afford not only rent, but to afford to buy a house and exit the renter pool and enter the owner pool. Well, this chart from our friends at Housing Wire shows you the hourly wage needed just to afford rent. Okay. The typical one bedroom wage needed to afford rent, you have to be in the 60th percentile of earners and making over $28 an hour. Okay, now this is, you know, this is for the low wage people, right, to afford a one bedroom rent. And if you want a two bedroom, you've got to be in the 70th percentile. And that means you gotta be earning almost $34 an hour to just afford two bedroom rent. Not to be able to save a down payment, sock lots of money away and then qualify for a mortgage and buy a house. So it just shows you we've got this situation. And listen, I don't think this is good. There are a lot of things that I am philosophically against that I think are troubling for society. Inflation is one of them. I don't think that's good, but it is what it is. And I am a pragmatist and I just go with the trends. And that's what you need to do too because you're not going to change any of this other stuff, right? So when looking at this, this shows you that there is going to be a lot of rental demand for a very, very long time to come. And we've talked about the housing shortage ad nauseam and you know that that housing shortage has probably another good seven years to run before we reach equilibrium. But yeah, there's going to be a lot of rental demand for a very long time and an overall housing shortage for buyers and renters for another good seven years to come. All right, here is a map showing the number of minimum wage jobs needed to afford two bedroom rent. You know, one of the other things I really love is memes. A meme encapsulates such a big idea in a little square photo that you might see on any social media platform. It's got some words in it, it's got a photo and it just conveys a big idea in a very small space, perfectly built for a short attention span. And one meme that I saw during the last election was interesting. You know, it was a Democrat politician, I don't remember who, as if they were talking to a voter, right? The politician says, look at all the jobs, there are so many jobs in America. And the voter says, yeah, I have three of those jobs, right? And that's sadly the way it is for people on minimum wage or the lower end of the wage spectrum. They've got to work multiple jobs and that's not right. Okay, it's not, but it is the way it is. So this map of the US shows the number of minimum wage jobs needed to just afford rent on a two bedroom place. And here are the states at federal minimum wage that exacerbate the housing crisis. Okay. You know, it's kind of counterintuitive on this chart, by the way, because you would think that California and New York would be the worst, right, because housing is very expensive in those markets. But that's actually not true because the minimum wages are much higher there. So the ratio is actually slightly more favorable. However, that is also misleading. Why is it misleading? Well, many factors. It's complicated. An onion that you have to constantly peel back the layers on. But here's just one of them. I grew up in Los Angeles, California, right? And LA is old. It's an old city. There are lots of really slummy old homes and apartments there, and it's just crappy. And in L. A you could get a two bedroom place, but it would be a dump compared to a nice newer class A two bedroom apartment that you might get in Dallas or Houston or, well, I don't want to say Miami because that's too expensive, but you know, some middle market of Florida, like Tampa, Tampa is even expensive now. Right, but you get the idea, right? You've got newer properties there. So it is complicated, of course, but the concept is the same and it just shows to Goya that if you want to be able to afford anything, it is a struggle. It is a real struggle. So how can you help? Right, as a real estate investor, you know, the typical unaware person would say, oh, you real estate investors are making housing more unaffordable by buying up all the properties. No, that's just elementary school stupidity. Right? Those people don't get it. As a real estate investor, what are you doing? Say you buy a new property. So you go to your favorite website, Jason hartman.com and you click on the properties page and you find a property there that you want to buy and it's $350,000 single family home in one of our markets. You reach out to us, an investment counselor helps you, you buy the property. What have you just done there? You didn't take a property away from the renter. What you did is you supported the building industry and incentivize them to work hard to create more Housing supply. If you didn't show up in that transaction, that wouldn't have happened. There would have been no feedback mechanism telling the supplier to create more product. And that's what ultimately will solve the housing shortage. Right. But it's going to take a very long time because it's very inelastic. Okay. And it will take a long time to solve this problem. So as an investor, supply housing to the marketplace, the marketplace that desperately needs the housing. Okay. All right, so here are some inventory stats. And what's interesting here and why I wanted to show you this is that this is according to nar, the national association of Realtors, this is their inventory stats. Right. You know, for those of you watching on video, you see this chart, but they just say that inventory decreased to 1.53 million units in June from 1.54 million the previous month. So inventory is going down slightly. It's being absorbed by buyers. Right. Or people that just don't sell their home, take their home off the market, whatever. But what you can see is overall, during the Great Recession and for quite a while after, inventory was extremely high. In fact, right now we have some of the lowest inventory levels except for that really low point in early 2022. During the COVID era, there was just no inventory. But inventory historically is still extremely low. And this chart goes back to 1999. So good. 26 years of inventory here. Now, I have shared with you many times over the years that I don't like the NAR statistics because they measure inventory differently. And these homes that they show as inventory are actually not available to buy necessarily. Many of them aren't because they are pending sales or they are contingent sales. And what we want is only active listings. Those are actually the properties you can buy today. So we go to Altos and Housing Wire for that data and we see that we have just slightly over 800,000 homes for sale in the United States. Still very low, historically speaking, but 30% higher than last year. Always ask yourself, compared to what are we comparing to one year ago? Or are we comparing historically to, you know, many years and you'll see that inventory still historically very low. Use either method of counting inventory you want or other methods. Just always compare apples to apples and make sure you are comparing it to the same survey. So if you're looking at 2015 compared to 2025, you want to see the inventory in the same survey. So you've got an apples to apples comparison. Don't jump from one to the other because then it will just give you wrong information and you can make wrong decisions with wrong information. And the other thing, Be sure to join us for our upcoming masterclass the second Wednesday of every month. Jason hartman.com Wednesday for our monthly masterclass that's totally free and also talk to our investment counselors or go to Jason hartman.com in the properties page and check out our notes. If you'd like to be a short term lender, we've got some great opportunities for you to earn 10 to 12% on your money. Very secure high equity properties. Those should be great. So check them out. A lot of our clients are just kind of looking to park money because I know real estate's kind of boring right now. It's not too terribly exciting. Right. And so some people are just looking to park some money on the sidelines and the notes are a great way to do it because it's very short term and high equity and very high yield, 10 to 12%. So check that out@jason hartman.com without further ado, let's get to our guest and let's talk about self directed IRAs. It is my pleasure to welcome Adam Bergman to the show. He is the founder of IRA Financial and he does self directed IRAs. We've done shows on that several times over the years, but not recently. And he has some advanced strategies he wants to share. Adam, welcome. How are you?

Thanks, Jason. Look forward to our conversation.

Yeah. Well, where would you like to start? You know, we talked about several things before we started. You know, I'll leave it to you as to where you want to go with it.

Okay. I'll kind of give kind of a brief history of the IRA world. Self directed IRAs, kind of where we sit now in the marketplace. So IRAs were created in 1974 by ERISA. There's about 65 million IRAs, around $17 trillion in IRAs. There's multiple types of IRAs. There's something called a traditional IRA, which is a pre tax IRA where you get a deduction for putting money in, but when you pull it out, you pay tax. There's something called a Roth IRA that it's an after tax IRA where you don't get a deduction for putting money in, but as long as you're over 59 and a half and the Roth's been open five years, everything you pull out is tax free. So it's an amazing.

Peter Thiel really hacked the Roth IRA better than anybody, by the way. Let me just tell that story for just a quick moment. So Peter Thiel bought some you know, startup, founder, stock, private stock and like companies like Facebook. He bought it in his Roth IRA and that account ended up being worth like $5 billion. It's insane. And so that money, when he takes it out, is tax free. It's incredible. It's an incredible deal. So, but, but did they modify.

Double click on that? Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'll double click. They didn't modify. Those rules still exist. He actually worked with a mentor of mine to. You can 97. Yeah, you can still do it. PayPal was created in 99. He actually put in around 1800 bucks in PayPal. So there's two requirements. Yeah, there's two requirements in order to make. So let me do this. There's three things you cannot do with an ira. You can't buy life insurance. You can't buy collectibles like art. And then thirdly, under 4975, the tax code, you cannot do anything in your IRA that directly or indirectly personally benefits you, your lineal descendants, your parents, children, spouse, daughter, law, son in law, or any entities 50% or more controlled by such persons. So what did Peter Thiel do? He owned less than 50% of PayPal because he has Elon Musk and some other investors as well, other founders. He paid fair value for the shares of PayPal because it was a startup. He paid par value which was like less than a penny a share, put in 1700 bucks and he turned that into around $26 million in several years. But like you mentioned, Jason, his biggest score was he was the first investor into Facebook and instead of using personal money, he put $500,000 of Roth IRA money and he turned that into approximately $450 million several years later when it went public. So you can employ that same strategy today where we get the five year.

Friends like $5 billion in it or something.

He did, he does. So he made other investments like Palantir as well as many others. So over the years or the last 20 years, he was able to take that probably 6, $700 million and almost 10 exit.

Wow.

Yeah, smart guy.

It's all possible in terms of the ira. They did not change those rules. I remember reading some articles about people were kind of outraged and that's why I thought maybe the rules kind of changed on that.

But no, no, they never changed. You can still do exactly what Peter Thiel did. In fact, I've done some of that just with on a way smaller scale, unfortunately. So it's all possible whether it's real estate or private business stock.

You know, I have talked to you many times about my experience with a gold dealer years ago. And the one major flaw of precious metals investing when it comes to gold and silver, and that is that it does not produce income. But what if you could make gold and silver work for you just like your income property? Well, you can. Our new sponsor is Monetary Metals and people who own gold as a hedge against inflation like that feature. But the gold just sits there. It's collecting dust, right? But with their leasing program you can actually earn a yield. So check out our new sponsor, monetary metals. It's monetary-metals.com hartman and you can learn more about this opportunity. Instead of paying to store your metal, you can now get paid to own it. Earning passive income. Paid in more ounces of real physical gold every single month. With Monetary Metals you can earn up to 4% in their leasing program immediately upon funding your account. Yields are paid monthly in ounces of physical gold or silver, which you can get in addition to any price appreciation from your gold and silver over the holding period. Fund your account with metal you already own or purchase it from them at less than 1% over spot. I liked this product so much I signed up myself. Gold and silver are a great insurance policy. Again, I never really treated them as an investment. They were just kind of an insurance policy. But now you can earn a return of up to 4% on that insurance policy. So it just got a lot better. Visit monetary-metals.com.com hartman and learn more about this program. Okay, good. Keep going.

So two benefits I mentioned of why using an IRA is so important in an investment setting is you get a deduction if you're using a pre tax IRA, like a traditional IRA, a SEP IRA, a simple IRA or a 401K. And then if you use a Roth IRA, two ways you can do that through a conversion of pre tax to Roth which is subject to income tax, or by making Roth contributions. So in 2025 you can put away 7,000 if you're under $58,000 in an IRA or Roth IRA. A SEP IRA 70,000 and a simple IRA is around 14,500 401K. You can do around 23, 5 or 31,000 if you're over 50. So those are the primary ways of of getting money into a retirement account. All types of retirement accounts can be self directed. When IRAs were created in 1974 by ERISA, by Congress, they did not distinguish between IRAs that invest in stocks and IRAs that invest in real estate. Okay, the only three things you can't do or what I just mentioned, everything else, you can do it. So that allows you to create your own freedom, create your own luck and create your own wealth.

I like the way you say that. Create your own freedom, your own luck and your own wealth. That's great. So there are some tax implications though people need to think about, like unrelated business income and so forth. Can you talk about those?

Yeah, absolutely. So I'll put on my lawyer's hat. I was a tax lawyer in New York City for eight years. I worked some of the largest law firms in the world and I actually never heard of a self directed ira. I was lucky enough that I was fortunate to do some research for a client of the firm who was a hedge fund client that wanted to use his IRA to invest in a hedge fund. And I was just blown away. Lo and behold, you are able to invest your IRA in alt. So that kind of led me to quit my job and start IRA Financial. And in general, all investments you do with a retirement account are tax deferred or tax free, meaning you don't pay tax in the IRA environment. So if the investment generates capital gains, right. You sell stocks, you sell real estate for a dollar and you sell it for a million, it's tax free in the ira. Interest, interest on loans, you lend your friend money, he pays you interest. Tax free. Dividends from stock, private or public, tax free. Royalties, rental income, all tax free. Unfortunately, there's one tax that applies to charities like the Red Cross, but also to IRAs. And that's known as unrelated business income tax or UBIT is put in the code in the 50s really to stop companies like McDonald's from setting up charities and running their business through charities and never paying tax. But unfortunately it also applies to IRAs because an IRA is tax exempt like a charity. So this UBIT is only triggered in three instances. That's it. Just three times. Number one, if you use margin to buy stock. Okay. Number two, if you use a loan to buy real estate and whether it's margin or whether it's a loan to buy real estate, the loan must be non recourse. Why? Because Internal revenue code section 4975 does not allow you to personally guarantee an obligation of your ira. So that's why the loan must be non recourse. Non recourse means you do not personally guarantee the obligation, the retirement.

And so what this means to the traditional real estate investor is that you can't get the really good leverage. And we love leverage as real estate Investors, you can't get that great leverage inside the ira. You can get, okay leverage. There are lenders that will do like 50% LTV and so forth. I haven't really checked into this lately. Not many of our clients do it. A lot of times what they do is they put their other assets in their IR in their self directed IRA and you know, they have the real estate outside now. Now you can do notes within your self directed ira and that's pretty good.

Right? Right. Exactly Jason. So and then the third category is if your IRA invested in an active business like a restaurant, that's owned through an LLC, a pass through entity, there could be UBIT. Now the UBA tax is in 2025 tax, the highest rate is 37% or you hit that at a very, very low threshold around $15,000. So it's a very painful tax. But there are, there are ways to get around it. If you work with IRA financial, you know, we have the expertise. So here's a few little tricks. Number one, if you're self employed and a lot of real estate investors are self employed or they have a business with no full time employees other than the owners, you can set up what's called a Solo 401K. And unlike an IRA, one of those.

I have a solo K. There you go.

So Jason, I don't know if you know, but if you use a Solo 401k to buy real estate, the right company, you can go get a non recourse loan and there's no UBIT tax because there's an exemption under the Internal Revenue Code 514C9 that allows you to use a non recourse loan to buy real estate and a 401k and not be subject to this UBIT tax. So that 37% tax. So you, we have a lot of clients, thousands and thousands of clients are able to get leverage and not pay the UBIT tax so long as they move from the IRA world to the 401k world. So that's one way to eliminate you. But the second way is you can employ what's called a blocker strategy. And a blocker strategy means basically set up a domestic C Corp. Okay, it could be a Delaware C Corp. And you reduce that 37% tax to 21%. Right, because the corporate income tax rate is 21% whereas the uber maximum tax rate is 37%. So there are some two quick ways to do it. You mentioned hard money loans. Instead of investing, you can do hard money lending and the interest you receive Back from the real estate developer who's borrowing the money is tax deferred in the retirement account.

Yeah. So you can do hard money lending, but you can also just buy notes within your ira, correct?

Yeah, absolutely.

So you can either fund the note directly and be the lender, or you can be the note buyer after that loan has been initiated. And I think, absolutely. I think that's pretty good strategy for a self directed IRA is to have the notes inside the ira, IRA and the real estate outside of the ira. I think that would be kind of an optimum strategy, actually.

Yeah, I mean, listen, for me, I, I've, I drink what I, what I produce and I have real estate in my ira. And the way I use it is I was able to get a little bit of leverage. I borrowed from a friend, kind of did a joint venture. You can actually do personal and IRA at the same time, so long as it's structured properly and co invest or co invest with friends or family. And I was able to buy a rental property, I Airbnb it. You just can't use it personally, which is fine for me. I rent it out, I get tax free income and eventually when I sell it, my properties appreciated at least 2x. So it was, it turned out to be a really good investment for me.

Okay, all right, good. What else should we know?

I think the most important thing to know honestly is twofold. Number one is you need to understand, your listeners need to understand. And number one, Congress wants you to diversify. If they did not want you to buy real estate or do alternative assets, they could have easily limited, just like a 529 plan, a college savings plan. You cannot do alts in it. You couldn't. A Coverdale, not in a 529.

And when you say alts, you mean alternative investments. And that means not like publicly traded stock is considered, correct, right?

Yes, Jason. Everything that's not publicly traded is considered an alternative, whether it's a private equity interest, venture capital, real estate, gold, even Bitcoin, even though it's technically publicly traded. It's not now.

It is, but it wasn't, it wasn't before. And folks, I got to just, I got to just comment on that for everybody. That's such a scam. The fact that they call all of these investments that are, you know, like real estate rental properties, which are, that's, I argue, the best investment class in the entire world. The fact that they call that alternative shows you that Wall street runs the world.

Yes, they do, they do.

I mean, what is Alternative about buying rental properties, like that's some little weird thing that people would do, right?

So. So, Jason. You got it. They're trying to scare people. Why? Because the traditional financial institutions, when IRAs were created in 1974 under RISA, they could easily have allowed all of us to buy real estate, to buy gold, to do private equity, venture capital, whatever they wanted. They chose not to purposely. Why? Simple dollars and cents. They make money when you buy stocks, you buy products, mutual funds, ETFs, they sell. And when you pay them for their investment advice, they do not make money when you pull the money out and buy a house in Texas. So they claim, you know, it's alternative. They scare people into not wanting to do it. They claim it's very tricky and hard and it's totally untrue. And thankfully, over the last 10 years or so, more and more people are looking at real estate and other investments as not just an alternative asset, but really as a primary source of generating wealth.

Yeah, very interesting. I know. It's just, it's just the way they name things to try and kind of discourage people from doing it. They want you buying purposeful S P stocks, right?

Yeah.

Okay, good. So let's talk about different companies for a moment and what they offer. You know, there are many self directed IRA companies out there. What should someone look for, Adam, when they're, when they're investing? Well, when they're investing. But they're having to choose a self directed Iraq company to, you know, sort of manage the plan, if you will.

Right. So obviously I'm biased, but this is what I would do. First of all, I would want to work with a company that had flat fees. Okay. There's a lot of different companies in the space. They're going to charge you asset valuation fees, like 1% of all your assets, which is crazy because this could get.

Really expensive if you've got a big account.

Could. And guess who's doing all the work? You are. Right. You're picking the investment, you're saying by property A, by real estate fund B. So why should you pay me for making wise investment decisions? That, number one, makes no sense. So fees matter. There's a lot of leakage, a lot of ways to reduce the value of your retirement account, and that's through fee. So, number one, I look out for that. Number two is expertise. Right. Like, for example, there are a number of companies in the space. And we talked about this, Jason, Offline is like, they won't let you do what's called checkbook control.

When.

What's checkbook control? It's a structure that's been legally codified since 1996 by Swanson v. Commissioner in 2001 by a field service advisory opinion. Basically, it's creating a vehicle like an LLC that's wholly owned by your ira, managed by you, and then gives you limited liability protection. Gives you what's called checkbook control, or freedom to just make investments on your own, like writing a check to, you know, a plumber instead of having to go through the custodian, which takes time and costly. So we've been doing that for 15 years. A lot of companies still are like, no, it's too risky, you can't do it. And that just a fee grab, it's just there to limit your ability to have some control. So you have to go through the custodians, a conduit, and then they can charge you for every transaction you do. So that's number two, make sure you're working with a self directed IRA custodian that has the expertise and it's willing to give you all available options. And then thirdly, I think continued consulting services, tax services. So IRA Financial, we feel strongly that we don't want to just set up your IRA and send you on your way. We want to build a relationship with you that's going to last many, many years. So we offer annual consulting services, annual tax filing and tax reporting services. So we do everything for you and all you need to do is worry about your investment. We handle all IRS tax, tax filing, state, federal, whatever relates to the investment will handle.

What are the fees?

We have a flat fee of just under 500 bucks a year. Flat. Irrespective. If you have $50 million, you're going to pay 500 bucks. We have some reduced fees if you have.

So even Peter Thiel, if Peter Thiel was your client, it'd be 500 bucks.

500 bucks? Why? Because Peter Thiel. Right. Peter Thiel's doing all the work. Right. It's one thing. If I was given Peter Thiel investment advice, then yes, I probably should benefit from the investment outcome. But here, Peter Thiel's the brilliant guy, or Jason's the brilliant guy, or Adam's a brilliant guy. Why should I charge you more? Because you're smart. I don't. I don't. It's unethical. So we feel very strongly about giving everyone great service at the same price.

Yeah. Okay. How about other fees? I mean, you know, there's always these little nickel and dime fees, right? Are there any of those we should expect, man.

We don't really, we don't charge for research. There's some wire fees the bank charges. We use your Capital One or you ubs. So there are some wire fees and stuff that we have to charge, but otherwise, no, there's no other. There's no other fees. There's consulting services, which is generally around 300 bucks a year. It's generally something the clients opt into. We don't force it upon anyone, but it gives them access to all our tax professionals, lawyers, accountants, and also the ability for us to do tax filings and reportings. And probably 95% of our clients do it because it's so inexpensive.

And clients would set up an LLC and then have checkbook control of that LLC where they can pay the bills directly. So unlike some of the other companies which you alluded to before, you don't have to pay fees to pay a bill, right?

Yeah. Let's do a quick example. Jason. So I have 200 grand. I want to buy an apartment in Florida. And I have two choices. I can set up a self directed IRA with IRA Financial, send the 200 grand, IRA Financial, IRA Financial, wire the money to the seller. Title will be IRA Financial Trust for the benefit of Adam's ira. The second way is I set up an llc. I call it ABC LLC in Florida. IRA Financial does it all. We do the operating agreement, the tax ID number. You get a local bank account for the llc or you can use Capital One. Through our relationship with them, we can do it for you. You wire the 200 grand to IRA Financial. IRA Financial, see, sends the 200 grand to the LLC. You manage the LLC or the manager, the owner is the IRA. And since an LLC is a disregarded entity, it means it doesn't pay tax. There's no entity level tax. So all the income and gains will flow from the real estate all the way to the ira. But the LLC will give you checkbook control because you can write a check to Joe the Plumber. You also get limited liability protection.

Joe the Plumber, by the way, has been on my show just.

I love jealous Plumber.

So you know Joe, Joe the Plumber was, is a real person. You know, he's the guy that said to Obama during the exact campaign, you know you're going to redistribute my wealth.

Exactly. So I like Joe the Plumber. So that's funny. That's hilarious. And then ultimately the limit liability protection shield protects all your assets outside the ira. Plus you get a little bit of privacy. It's hard for for people to know creditors to know who owns that asset and just makes things faster and easier for you. So that's what the Checkbook Control LLC special purpose vehicle does. And you know, we basically wrote the book on that.

Yeah. Good stuff. Okay, give out your website, tell people where they can find out more.

Definitely. If you go to irifinancial.com there's lots of great info. You can check our YouTube channel at Ira Financial. Thousands of videos, short long on basic stuff, some of the more advanced investment stuff. And you can kind of Paris it at your leisure and, you know, have some fun with it.

Adam, thanks for joining us.

Jason, it's a pleasure. Thank you.

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