Your IRA is allowed to buy real homes. Nobody at the bank will tell you.
Most retirement savings sit in a fund somebody else picked, earning whatever the market decides that decade. There has been another road since 1974 — quieter, and mostly travelled by people who happened to find out early.
On the 18th, Jeff Minnick of Directed IRA will show you exactly how it works: what a Self-Directed IRA can hold, how to move money into one without triggering a tax bill, and what changes when retirement capital starts earning 9–15% a year behind real, occupied, affordable homes.
One evening. Sixty minutes. Bring every question you have.
The retirement you actually pictured.
Most retirement arithmetic is built quietly on four or five percent and a certain amount of hope. It is the number underneath everything else — whether you stop at sixty-two or keep going to seventy, whether the house is paid off, whether there is something left over for the people who come after you.
Very few people are ever told that the account itself was never the limit. An IRA can hold far more than funds — real estate, private notes, private credit — and inside the account, every dollar of that income compounds without being taxed on its way through.
Applied patiently across a decade, that one change is the difference between a comfortable retirement and a generous one.
Illustrative only, for education. Assumes annual compounding inside a tax-deferred account with no withdrawals, using 5% as a conventional fixed-income baseline and 12% as the midpoint of Proactive's 9–15% target range. Actual returns will differ, targets are not guarantees, and every investment can lose value.
Four things most people learn ten years too late.
No slides about market outlook. Just the mechanics of an account you are already allowed to open, explained by somebody who sets them up every day — and the handful of details that decide whether the whole thing works the way you expect it to.
What your IRA is actually allowed to own
The tax code runs backwards from what most people assume. It names the short list of things a retirement account may not hold — collectibles, life insurance — and leaves nearly everything else open, including real estate and private credit. You will leave knowing exactly where the line sits.
How to move the money without a tax bill
Old 401(k)s, existing IRAs, SEPs and SIMPLEs can move custodian-to-custodian without a taxable event. Jeff walks through the mechanics, the paperwork and the timing — including the small mistakes that quietly turn a clean transfer into a distribution.
What tax-deferred compounding really does
Income earned inside the account is not taxed as it arrives. On a fixed-income position paying quarterly, that difference stops being academic somewhere around year four. We will run the arithmetic on screen rather than put a number on a slide.
The rules, before you need them
Prohibited transactions, disqualified persons, UBIT and UDFI — in plain English, with examples. This is the part that costs people money when they learn it late, and it is why the evening is worth an hour even if you never invest a dollar alongside us.
Meet Jeff Minnick.
VP, Relationship — New Accounts · Directed IRA
Jeff spends his days walking investors through exactly this decision — what to move, how to move it, and what to watch for on the way. He has had the conversation you are about to have several thousand times.
Directed IRA is the tradename of Directed Trust Company, a licensed Arizona trust company examined each year by state bank examiners and audited by outside CPAs. It was founded in 2018 by Mat Sorensen and Mark Kohler — the team behind The Self-Directed IRA Handbook and the Directed IRA Podcast — and has been named by Inc. 5000 several times over as the fastest-growing IRA provider in the industry, with more than a thousand five-star client reviews behind it.
How the evening runs.
Tight, useful, and finished on time. Jeff takes the first three quarters and the last stretch belongs to you — no hard stop while there are still hands up.
Where the money is now
5 minWhy almost all retirement capital ends up in the same handful of funds, and what that quietly costs over a working life.
The account, explained
12 minWhat a Self-Directed IRA is, who actually holds it, what it can own, and how it differs from the IRA you already have.
Getting your money there
12 minRollovers and transfers, step by step. What is taxable, what is not, and the paperwork order that keeps it clean.
The rules that matter
10 minProhibited transactions, disqualified persons, UBIT and UDFI — plainly, with the examples that make them stick.
A worked example
10 minHow a fixed-income, real-estate-backed position behaves inside an IRA, using a Proactive bond as the illustration.
Live Q&A
The restOpen floor. Your account, your situation, your questions — answered by the person who does this all day.
This evening was built for you.
- You have an old 401(k) sitting with an employer you left years ago.
- You have an IRA earning a number you would rather not say out loud.
- You have heard "self-directed" and assumed it was complicated, or risky, or for somebody else.
- You would like the money you retire on to have done something you are glad about.
Why we are the ones putting this on.
We finance naturally occurring affordable housing — the manufactured-home communities, workforce apartments and SRO buildings quietly holding up the bottom half of the American housing market. It is exactly the kind of asset a Self-Directed IRA was built to hold: real, occupied, income-producing, and boring in the best possible way.
We are not the custodian and we take nothing for the account. We simply meet a great many investors who wish somebody had explained this to them ten years sooner. So we asked Jeff. The whole team will be on the call.
The honest answers.
The things people email us about after they register — answered here so you do not have to spend a question on them during the Q&A.
Do I need to be an accredited investor to attend?
No. The evening is about how the account works, and it is open to anyone who wants to understand it. Proactive’s own bonds are offered only to accredited investors under Rule 506(c) — but that is a separate conversation, and not this one.
Is this a pitch?
No. Jeff’s hour is about the account, not our bonds. We use one Proactive position as the worked example in section five because abstract examples teach nobody anything. If you leave and open a Self-Directed IRA to buy something else entirely, the evening did its job.
What if I cannot make it live?
Register anyway. We send the recording and the slides to everyone on the list. The Q&A is the part that does not really survive a recording, so come if you can.
Does moving my 401(k) trigger taxes?
Handled correctly, as a direct custodian-to-custodian transfer, no. Handled carelessly, it can. Telling those two apart is most of section three.
What does it cost?
Nothing. No cost, no obligation, and nobody will call you unless you ask us to.
Sixty minutes that quietly change the next twenty years.
The account has been sitting there, available, your entire working life. This is simply the evening somebody finally explains it. Seats are limited so the Q&A stays a real conversation.
Save my seatThis session is educational and is not tax, legal, or investment advice; please consult your own advisor about your circumstances. Proactive Sustainable Bonds is not a custodian and does not provide custodial services. Nothing here is an offer to sell or a solicitation to buy any security. Interests in Proactive's bonds are offered solely under Rule 506(c) of Regulation D to accredited investors via the Fund's Private Placement Memorandum, which governs. Such securities are unregistered, speculative and illiquid, involve risk including loss of capital, and are not FDIC- or SIPC-insured. Past performance does not indicate future results; targets are illustrative.