Episode #11 : Create Financial Security with a Self-Directed IRA with Henry Yoshida

 
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When it comes to investing, it can feel like there are endless options for investment vehicles, strategies, and accounts. Invest in residential real estate or commercial? Roll over your old 401K, or open an IRA? Today we’re talking about an investment account you may not have realized is a good option for wealth creation: a self-directed IRA (SDIRA). And here to explain what this is, how it works, and how a SDIRA can help you build financial security, we’ve got Henry Yoshida!

Henry is the CEO of Rocket Dollar, a fintech platform that lets individuals invest their IRA and old 401(k) funds into private and alternative investments such as real estate, crypto, crowdfunding, startups, and others.

We start off chatting about Henry’s career in financial advisory, management consulting, and fintech. He talks about why he pivoted to fintech and Rocket Dollar’s mission to make self-directed IRAs more accessible. Henry talks about the history of these investment vehicles, why big banks have historically directed people away from self-directed IRAs, and the pros and cons of this kind of investment. This is a fascinating episode and you’re sure to walk away with new ideas for putting your retirement dollars to good use.

In this episode, we’re discussing…

  • Why Henry and his team are dedicated to making self-directed IRAs more accessible and affordable.

  • How to set up a self-directed IRA.

  • What you can (and can’t) invest in with IRA funds, including real estate.

  • How IRAs and similar investment vehicles can help you create wealth and financial security.

  • Why self-directed IRAs are a great choice if you want to invest in things and places you care about.

Henry’s Top Tips:

“I believe the combination of a stagnating, or declining stock market, coupled with a projected $30T generational wealth transfer over the next ten years, will dramatically increase demand for private and alternative investments by consumers.” – Henry Yoshida

  • Self-Directed IRAs are available - even though they’ve been around for a while, big brokerages have discouraged people from investing in them because they’re not as good for their bottom line.

  • You can accelerate account growth by making good choices – wise investments can help your retirement funds grow more quickly, giving you greater wealth creation and financial security.

  • Invest in things & places you care about – a self-directed IRA gives you the flexibility to buy property in your hometown, support businesses you’re interested in, and leave a legacy to be proud of.

Resources:

 

+ Read the transcript

Nichole Stohler 0:01
Welcome back to the Richer Geek Podcast. Today we're going to be talking about an excellent financial vehicle that can be used to buy income producing investments. And when I left one of my previous employers, I rolled both my 401k and my health savings account into self directed IRAs, then that gave me the opportunity to invest in real estate as an alternative to the stock market. Likewise, my husband Mike leveraged his self directed IRA and he actually invested in a medical device company startup. So today we are talking about the self directed IRA. Today's guest is Henry Yoshida. Henry is the CEO of Rocket Dollar, which is a fintech platform that lets investors use their IRA and old 401k funds and invest into private and alternative investments such as real estate, crypto, crowdfunding, startups, and others. Welcome to the show, Henry.

Henry Yoshida 1:40
Thank you very much. Glad to be on.

Nichole Stohler 1:42
You have a really fascinating background, especially as we start talking about self directed IRAs. Could you share a little bit about yourself and how you came to, to Rocket Dollar?

Henry Yoshida 1:55
Sure, I graduated. It's interesting. So people remember this time. Now, it was two recessions ago, but I graduated in the year 2000, from my undergrad studies, and started working at Merrill Lynch. So regular day job. financial advisory wasn't the actual path, I was trying to go to law school. So I was actually going to work at Merrill for a couple years and save up money to go back to law school. But I happen to start in financial services at the time when the internet bubble was bursting. I'm in Austin, Texas, which was pretty heavily affected as a technology focused industry town. And very early on, I had to pivot the types of clients I worked with, because no individuals were opening up brokerage accounts and hiring advisors at Merrill Lynch. So rather than me sort of washing out of the program, I pivoted to working with small business owners and helping them set up their first 401k plan. So this was someone that may have left, the law firm, decided to start their own smaller law firm and just take maybe one paralegal with them in one client to start with. So with one of the things they needed was health insurance, 401k and a payroll system, and I kind of was connected to the payroll companies and then provided the 401k and just never looked back, I worked with these plans, I grew that business at Merrill Lynch for 10 years was one of the top consultants in the country for setting up back then small business plans. And by the time I left much, much larger companies and continue to do that as a management consultant for five years post Merrill Lynch, which became Bank of America. And in 2014, I pivoted again, I sold that business. And since then, I've worked in FinTech technology startups, I started one mobile app based IRA provider, we got that up and running to 30 employees, and then took an acquisition offer from Goldman Sachs, and for two years had to come up with something else to do, which is now rocket dollars. So my whole background led me to thinking that over the course of 17 years, I put close to six and a half billion dollars into regular traditional target date type mutual funds through the corporate employer channel. And I guess the way you refer to the W, tues and the day job, folks, and there was this increasing demand for folks to see if they could take those monies, keep the tax benefits of the IRAs, and four, one K's and do as, as all of us have done here on the show today, which was find alternate vehicle. So income producing real estate, or in my case, I'm kind of like your husband, Mike, where I had decided to make a series of investments into early stage technology companies. And if one or a few of those might have worked out, I wanted that to be inside of my IRA instead of just a big gain, and then a big subsequent tax bill. So that's kind of me in a nutshell from from my professional career, and how I ended up creating rocket daughter last year.

Nichole Stohler 4:37
It's such a great journey and an awesome story, and just a very solid background that you're bringing. And I think you're trying to solve, you know, just making the self directed IRA, more accessible for people and easier to understand. There's so many fantastic resources on your website. So we're talking about self directed IRA, but can you share with us what it actually is, and why people look at it?

Henry Yoshida 5:03
Sure, you know, the self directed IRA is not a term that I coined as a matter of fact, when I publicly talk about the capabilities that we provide our customers, I don't even use that term. In a sense, what we know as the self directed IRA is actually just another type of IRA, except that instead of investing in only public stocks, bonds and mutual funds, you're able to invest in private and unregistered securities. So that list that you said earlier, whether that's real estate become an LP and a private fund, even digital assets, cryptocurrency crowdfunding sites, or angel investments into startups directly, those have always been allowed for the IRS code. It's just the providers of IRAs have kind of created this marketplace where most of the investments that they allowed you to purchase were in those public security. So think like the dominant players, and they do it yourself Schwab, Vanguard, fidelity, the advisor driven channels like a Merrill Lynch, UBS, Edward Jones, so forth, and it always just kind of almost became thought of as those are the only things that you can invest in, but it's always been allowed. And even today, you know, they're, they're about a million and a half people, yourself, included your husband, myself, that have these types of accounts with those capabilities to invest outside. But that's a very small part of a 300 million account market in the US. So just by virtue of the disparity in those two numbers, a lot of people might think that you can't do it. And hopefully, we can shed some light and, and trying to show people that you can actually take those assets and invest in some things that you might have some particular knowledge, real estate in your own geographic area, and so forth, it has a great cap rate and a great investment return, even better if you don't have to pay taxes for, you know, upwards of maybe 234 decades on as well inside of an IRA. So always been allowed.

Nichole Stohler 6:53
So what are the steps, let's say you wanted to... and kind of what are the processes to get it set up?

Henry Yoshida 6:59
Like anything else, you have to find a provider that allows you to open up this type of IRA, one that's capable of doing that. And the most of the traditional players don't have that capability setup, because they're also functioning as a marketplace to give you access to the 10,000 publicly registered mutual funds or the 3627, large company stocks, and so forth. So there are a number of providers several dozen rocket dollar being one of them, that you could go to and open up an IRA. Now in our particular platform, we actually tried to show folks that the onboarding and account opening process is not that dissimilar from the major brokerage houses today. So the trades that TD Ameritrade and the Charles Schwab. So with us, people go to our site, they'll give us information just like they would opening any investment account. And we're going to basically verify that they qualify to open that investment account, capture the information, maybe one differences that we actually take payment in the form of a signup fee, and an ongoing maintenance. The reason is, of course, that we don't sell a mutual fund where we're able to get a portion of the fee. So we don't charge a fee on top of the account, we just charge this very sort of Netflix like bite sized chunks, subscription cost on a monthly basis. And our job is to maintain the treatment and maintenance of that account as an IRA for tax purposes. And we kind of view that our customers job is to go out and find great investment opportunities that are a fit for their portfolio and their financial lives.

Nichole Stohler 8:32
And when you talk about those investment opportunities, what actually can and cannot be one of those investments?

Henry Yoshida 8:41
So for us in a way, it's actually a better question to rephrase it in terms of not what you can and can't invest in, because I mentioned earlier that it's always been allowed. The codified terms of investments that you cannot hold inside of an IRA going all the way back to 1970, when it was started, was that you can't invest in collectibles and life insurance. So really, technically, anything outside of those two asset classes is allowed. But if you abstract that up one layer in IRAs, the bigger question and engaging of what you can do with your IRAs are related to who you do business with, and whether it's a prohibited transaction or not. So I'll give an example without this being a lesson. And I'm not a tax professional, per se. But the spirit of the rules essentially state that you can't do transactions with an entity that you control. And you can't really do business transactions with folks that are direct relatives of yours. So I'll give a quick example, you wouldn't be able to purchase a rental property with IRA dollars and lease it out to your daughter. Even if you charge a market rate, they just assume that maybe you won't. And it's still benefit to you personally, because you're providing shelter to someone who's a direct relative of yours. So in this case, your daughter, but if I wanted to purchase a rental property with my IRA, and it was in the Dallas, Texas area, and one of your listeners on the podcast was going to relocate temporarily for six months, assuming that that person isn't my son, daughter, mother or father, then they would be able to rent that property from me and I can receive that income in the IRA. So it's more of a question of who you transact with and less of what you can and can't do because most investments are allowed. So collectibles and life insurance notwithstanding so no Picasso's vintage Air Jordans sneakers and I guess no life insurance policies on on friends relatives or yourself.

Nichole Stohler 10:33
Vintage Air Jordans sneakers. I love that. Okay. I I guess they are okay. So I've used mine for real estate, crowdfunding real estate. So in that case, I'm I'm extremely hands off. It's not a property on managing. Right. And so that that is a very straightforward and of course, Mike investing in medical device startup. He's not involved in that at all, at all. What rules are there? Let's see, if you did want to buy you talked about that rental property in Dallas, what are the rules around management and being involved?

Henry Yoshida 11:07
Yeah, so if you buy the property directly, again, you really don't want to indicate that you're personally benefiting. So you're strongly encouraged to not go in and do any of the renovation, work yourself. But instead you use a property management company, that would be very, very hands off, because you're paying someone to manage that property, which is, in a way not that dissimilar from you investing in a number of properties, there are crowdfunding sites, someone has procured those properties, someone is managing those properties. And it's not you directly. So you know, on our site, we have information that kind of talks to those levels. And we we suggest that the best properties, if you go direct, single family, or direct ownership of a property in and of itself, would be sort of turnkey, ready to rent right away and manage their property manager that's pretty much ensures that you're not going in and saving $10,000 by doing some of the renovations yourself as a weekend project. As a matter of fact, I've been a big proponent in my career as a financial professional I've talked with probably at some point, at my peak, I probably had over 450,000, participants, a 401k is all over the country, in some way, shape, or form that kind of I manage that relationship. And I've always told folks that you need to diversify assets, most people focus too heavily on, you know, this asset class versus that asset class. And I tell people to kind of consider owning asset classes and different types of accounts IRA, non IRA. So an example would be that you own two single family properties, one outright in a non IRA type of account, because then you get additional benefits, you can go in and put some sweat equity yourself and renovate that property. It might provide personal satisfaction, exercise, and just a sense of accomplishment. You also from a tax and business standpoint, you get to depreciate that property, as well. And you get that the benefit of being able to use the income stream that comes in the form of rent, maybe to supplement your lifestyle, maybe you could take a full time job down to a part time job and supplement the difference with rental income right away than the other property that you own in the IRA, you don't have depreciation, but you get to basically accrue all the income that would come in from the rent checks on the property, and hold them in cash and keep deploying them into other investments that will continue to also be growing tax deferred for potentially many, many decades. And then at some point down the road, you could decide to distribute that property and take it as a game. So owning both those properties in two different types of holdings actually will yield very different benefits, both of which are good, if you're a good real estate investor. So that's how I think about it. But for me, short answer your question, I think the people, if they use IRA monies should be very hands off. As a matter of fact, those digital platforms you use for crowdfunding into real estate actually provide a lot of money. I think those are very well suited to self directed IRAs. Mostly because dollar for dollar, barring some unforeseen circumstances, every dollar you invest through an IRA into an investment will actually yield better returns than an income producing investment not held within an IRA in a taxable account. So we talked about that a lot, some videos that we post on our site, too.

Nichole Stohler 14:21
Oh, that's interesting, I'll have to absolutely check those out. And one of the things I was going to ask about the implications and logistics for taxes, and it sounds like nothing really, because you're not gaining the appreciate depreciation you're not I mean, it's just, it's just kind of like, you know, over on the traditional IRA side, it's, there's not really any implications as long as you're staying within your age window and those pieces.

Henry Yoshida 14:46
Sure. And, you know, for the listeners of the podcast, you know, maybe it helps if we kind of analogy eyes, but owning a non traditional or private investment study IRA is not that different than owning, maybe what most people are used to, let's say, it's a stock, you own shares of a public stock, and that stock pays a dividend. Let's say it's Microsoft, or Johnson and Johnson that pays a pretty regular and steady dividend, every time that dividend comes in, if you own that stock inside of your IRA, it comes in the form of cash, and it's just sitting there in cash and continuing to go tax deferred through the IRA. If you own that Johnson and Johnson or Microsoft stock in a brokerage account, you get the dividends paid in cash, you'll get a statement, you'll get a 1099, it'll tell you that you made a small amount of income on that stock ownership. So owning the property inside the IRA is the same thing. If you own the property, and that property pays a rent check, which is not that dissimilar from a dividend on a monthly basis, then all that rental income is actually deferred. The cash is in the IRA and is deferred. And once it builds up to a certain value, you can go into another investment or the real estate crowdfunding platforms you use might be more set up to do pretty bite size investments. So once you hit 500 or 1000 dollars, you might be able to redeploy capital back into that site and further diversify into another set of 20 properties or 100 properties or however that particular digital investment platform is set up. So I tell people, it's it's not that different. I mean, at the end of the day, all the folks that provide alternatives, capable IRAs are not that different than IRAs from the big brokerage houses, the only difference being what you're able to invest in.

Nichole Stohler 16:26
That's such a great point and a very good analogy. And I'm sure, as you mentioned, videos and blog posts and things on your website that they provide, you know, those comparisons and explanation. Are there any cons in using a self directed IRA that you can think of?

Henry Yoshida 16:43
Yeah, you know, I think that we're the ones trying to spearhead changes in this. But it's, it's difficult, it's more difficult, it's more expensive. That's been the case for many years, you know, some of the presentations we give publicly, the most famous users of self directed IRAs, and I tried to be sort of open to both coasts, but is Peter Thiel, the venture capitalists and co founder of PayPal, and probably more famously, the first investor in Facebook actually made some early investments using an IRA vehicle to make some of those early investments in these tech companies like Facebook, when he did, it was even called the Facebook. So it wasn't even facebook. com. And then on the East Coast, Mitt Romney at the time, early in his career before becoming a presidential candidate, and now, US senator from Utah, used self directed IRAs to invest in private stock when he was an early partner and one of the co founders of Bain Capital. So they very famously kind of utilize these vehicles, to, in their cases, nine and 10, figure size accounts that were IRA tax advantaged. And of course, at that time, it was extremely difficult and expensive, it wasn't widely known. And I would argue, we talked about this before, kind of starting the recording portion that many of the providers today are also very difficult, somewhat expensive, and I don't think do a very good job of communicating that this is just another version of an IRA. So for us at Rockefeller, we've kind of tried to set up our pricing to say that, hey, if you're going to make a $25,000 investment into some private alternative, whether it's real estate, crowdfunding, whether it's a direct investment into a company, our fee structure is kind of set up to where it's roughly point seven 5%. So that's right now lower than the average active large cap mutual fund, on a yearly basis to make that investment and own it in this wonderful tax structure where you can defer the income or the rent, or the dividends and whatever it may pay out. For many, many decades, I use, I use 30 years, it's kind of the time frame, because if you take the cross segment of everyone in America that owns an IRA, the average is roughly about 25 to 30 years away from 59 and a half, which is the first point when you can start to access that money was a penalty, so many, many years in the future for the average person that owns an IRA in America today.

Nichole Stohler 19:06
What I'd like to as you describing this, I didn't know about Peter Thiel, that's very interesting to understand is that you can accelerate the growth if you made good choices, right? If If I was the person who invested in the Facebook thing, that would have been amazing, as opposed to just a mutual fund or an index fund that's tracking the market, you just you can really accelerate your wealth in that way.

Henry Yoshida 19:31
And at the time, remember, Facebook had been turned down by many, many different venture capitalists, they had trouble raising capital in those early days. So it was by no means let's say the tech behemoth and large cap, profitable company that is today. So it brings me back to another point of what I think people can utilize these IRAs for. And this is a market where a lot of folks have IRAs, because by virtue of having a lot of past jobs, and eligible to move for one K's into IRAs, that if they, let's say, 10,000 people listening to this podcast episode, there probably are not only going to be 10,000 retirement accounts among the audience, there might actually be 20,000, because the average person could have two of these accounts. So what I try to change the dynamic of is to say that, well, if everyone has this pool of capital, with this great long term, tax deferral mechanism, then why are the vast majority of people holding very predictable return index fund investments. So I mean, for the course of let's say, 30 4050 years, it's been a very predictable, compound annual rate of return of roughly between seven to 9%, with a standard deviation of between 14 to 18%. And we're owning that in the account. So why would we have the somewhat predictable investments with a great tax treatment, and most people do private and alternative investments, by virtue of being unaware they can tap into those dollars now in taxable monies, because Facebook is that was a great investment, if you were that early, but it also would have been a gigantic tax bill, had you just done it with regular money, versus it would have been the same awesome investment with the IRA structure that Peter teal uses, but it's even a double win, because they also avoided the taxes, they can control how they might pay the tax burden on that investment, and so forth. So I try to tell people that, you know, you may want to consider putting that sort of risk capital portion of it inside of those tax protected accounts, as opposed to just reserving that entire capital pool for the very predictable, and so forth, or real estate, which is very high, ordinary current income producing investment. So that actually is a bad investment from a tax perspective in a very different way, which yields itself to be better held, potentially, in an IRA, instead of with just regular money, especially, we don't need that current income. And all of your listeners, the benefit to the group of people listening to this show, are, they have Have a great day job. And they're listening to this podcast to kind of find ways to leverage their time and their income earning abilities. Outside of work, whether that's through passive income opportunities, or passive things that can do outside of the regular Monday to Friday, nine to five,

Nichole Stohler 22:16
it's a great point. And thank you for taking us through that I was thinking about you had mentioned, hey, there might be twice the amount of accounts because of IRAs that people and then therefore, when KS, etc, the account that I also really, really like, and not every employer offers, this is the health savings account. And if you, you can leverage that, and then roll that over as well. And if you never draw from that to pay your medical bills as they come in during the year, and then you just that money grows triple tax protected, and you leave your employer, you can do something with that as well. I have one of those also.

Henry Yoshida 22:54
Sure. Yeah, I do too. So again, you know, that's a, that's a big growing market has great tax benefits, and also accessibility to the money four and a half years earlier than an IRA. So even above the triple tax benefit that you'd referenced, there's even earlier access to those monies as well. You know, of course, the trade off is lower annual contribution limits. But again, you know, for me, talking about the capabilities of an IRA that allow you to invest in private and unregistered securities aside, you know, what I always try to communicate is that there isn't enough consideration given to the location of assets, most of the time is spent on selection of assets versus I would argue that, if you just made a couple of smart changes to where the assets are located in terms of the types of accounts they're in, you'll actually yield far better results. Because if you're evaluating two different assets, asset a an asset be just a straight invest in the differences and returns on a risk adjusted basis, maybe 123 percent, compounded over 30 years, that's a big difference. But the difference, you know, earning an income producing asset or a high potential medical device startup investment, inside of an IRA versus not, could actually be the difference of around 30% per year, over the life of that investment. So we're talking about monumental differences in the ending account value, if the investment goes as planned, if it is a real, you know, high risk high return, and if the high return part materializes, you'd be much better served by having that asset and a better located account tax advantage deferral in your case, instead of the IRA, we've had a number of customers even take the steps of doing while the asset values are lower, the account values are low, or maybe in a low taxable income year, actually converting those accounts to a Roth, and then betting that the future growth will put them in a position to where never paying taxes on the growth will be more beneficial than just deferring it and paying taxes on a higher base later.

Nichole Stohler 24:56
It's so interesting what you said, people don't think about the location assets. I'm absolutely guilty of that 100%. And as you talk through, you know, clearly you have a wealth of knowledge and put a lot of these resources on your website, can you tell us a little bit about what information people can find and what they can participate in to educate themselves more?

Henry Yoshida 25:18
You know, for us, I would say that one of a good place to go is is our knowledge base. It's essentially the the newer term for an FAQ that we have. And I think we answer a lot of those questions. But as far as looking for the resources, itself, I mean, I go back now and I tell people to kind of concentrate and I think the listeners this podcast, I think that everyone has their own sort of personal sphere of knowledge, you would know the real estate market around where you live, or maybe where you grew up. I know the real estate market around here in Austin, Texas where I am. And if someone were looking to purchase a property, I would say, hey, downtown is very expensive in the central part of town. But six months ago, Apple Inc, announced plans to own in a new billion dollar campus in addition to the current one that already houses six or 7000 employees, here in Austin, Texas. And you could still buy townhouses within five miles of that new campus that has yet to be built three bedroom two bath turnkey properties with a manager running it through an HOA, because it's a condominium Association type style, probably for sub $300,000, even. So depending on the rent rates that you might be able to achieve, that could be a good investment for someone. So I try to encourage people to utilize their own personal knowledge, and then just get a good framework and basis and what we talked about, which is the asset location, and understanding the rules, you know, to be fair, I don't know that people personally have to become experts in the tax structure of IRAs, and so forth, maybe more so for the self directed space. But the vast majority of Americans just kind of have a general understanding and work with a provider that does that part for them, you know, what I'd ask people to do is to kind of consider what types of investments are the best fit for them. And it may be based on return and personal knowledge. But it could also what we found in our accounts, and we haven't talked about this, but my real sort of passion and belief and excitement about these IRAs that allow folks to invest in private deals, is that they can actually invest in things that they care about, as well, or in a community that they live in. And that's not something that's really possible today in the public markets, I mean, you're going to maybe invest in a mutual fund, which is based in one of the major money market centers, let's say, Boston, or New York, and you're buying that mutual fund through a financial advisory company, who maybe has a home base also in New York. So in a way, a lot of that value, and a lot of that economic value is not in your community, you and that's your money. Whereas now you might be able to divert 100,000 of your $300,000 accounts start purchasing diversified investments on the crowdfunding real estate platforms. But some of those platforms actually let you search local communities and zip codes that you care about. That's actually one of the ones I use allows me to look for specific cities. And then I pick the ones that be quite frank, I'm not sure if I really look at the ones that have a 1% better return than another, I kind of gravitate towards the cities where I have family that lived there I used to live there, it's kind of a nice thing for me to be able to do. And I'm still getting my rate of return inside of a tax deferred account. And I feel like I'm kind of doing well. And being responsible for myself, while also kind of doing something a little bit better for a community versus a lot of the money and value going back to New York City through the form of mutual fund company and financial advisor,

Nichole Stohler 28:40
conversion of shop local or staying with the local restaurants. And it's basically a similar type of thing.

Henry Yoshida 28:47
I think so yeah. And that's, it's been a big, big movement. So it's important to a lot of people to kind of support where you're from. I'm from Texas, so we probably have over pride of being from Texas. But you know, it's important to and if I'm able to get the investment returns that I need, and want, while also keeping things within the state, by purchasing a rental property in Dallas, you know, the town I grew up in, it's kind of a win win for everybody, except maybe the beginning of Wall Street, mutual fund company, and so forth.

Nichole Stohler 29:19
Absolutely. Tell us how listeners can get in touch with you or learn more, where would you direct them?

Henry Yoshida 29:25
Yeah. So everything we have is digital and online. Pretty simple. It's rocketdollar.com. So the word rocket, the word dollar, dot com, then the whole point and name of the business itself is that, you know, hopefully, our platform gives people an opportunity to go places and do things with their money that maybe they previously hadn't thought they could go before. So a lot of our informations there, you know, we're on twitter at pocket dollar. And from there, you have the ability to chat with some of the folks on our team, they're all I would argue, just as knowledgeable if not more than I am. With some of the ins and outs, we don't give investment or tax advice. But we can talk about, you know how to set up one of these accounts get you through that process. And, and again, like what we said, for a Netflix like subscription on a monthly basis, our job is to maintain your account as an IRA, your job is to go find, you know, the right investments for you, your portfolio, your life, things you care about and things you know about.

Nichole Stohler 30:25
Excellent. Thank you so much. Really great to have you on today and enjoy learning so much from you as well.

Henry Yoshida 30:32
Thank you very much. I appreciate it.

Nichole Stohler 30:34
Hey everyone. Thanks again for tuning into The Richer Geek Podcast and do check out RocketDollar.com. When Henry and I were chatting before and actually after the episode recording, he was asking a few questions about Mike and I our business and the fact that Mike is a full time real estate investor managing our overall portfolio and continuing to build that portfolio. And he mentioned that we may want to look at the strategy around solo 401k. Now this is a vehicle that not only you can leverage those funds to invest in alternative investments, which is what Henry really spoke about on the show with a self directed IRA, same kind of opportunity, the solo 401k, you can also invest in just traditional stock market. But it's the fact that that particular vehicle provides incremental tax shelter for more income way more than you could put into your 401k and an IRA. So I think that when I look at our tax returns, that we actually just got back, I feel like we could have done more. I do feel like we maximize with real estate investing the maximize depreciation and other expenses that help reduce our income bracket, tax bracket. But I feel like there is more that we could be doing. So I will be exploring that. And I will absolutely be talking about that on a future episode. The other thing that seems to me is that there's all these different vehicles that can be used to either, you know, purchase a franchise by a small business, or just real estate investing crowdfunding, and those vehicles are, you know, leveraging your retirement funds, but there's all these different structures to make that a little bit easier to navigate. And I've actually struggled with this a bit, I put together a comparison sheet, you can access that at the richer geek.com forward slash compare. And it's again just to talk about these different options that we're discussing as ways to help you fund alternative investments. Again, the richer geek.com forward slash compare. The other thing to note is that if you have any topics you would like me to cover or that I haven't covered, or you want me to go deeper into in future episodes, drop me a note and let me know there's a place on the website where you can submit a question that you'd like us to focus on. You can also send me a connection or a note via LinkedIn. I'm Nicole and I ch allele. Stoller sto h le ER and I'm on LinkedIn, and I look forward to hearing from you and continuing to provide resources and information that helps you grow your wealth. Thanks for tuning in to the Richard geek podcast. For today's show notes including links and resources. Visit us at the richer geek calm. Don't forget to head over to iTunes, Google Play stitcher or wherever you get your podcasts and hit the subscribe button. help us spread the word by sharing with others who could benefit from listening and leave a rating and review that'll help us get the podcast in front of more people. I appreciate you. Thanks so much for listening.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

The information, statements, comments, views, and opinions (collectively, “Information”) provided in this podcast are not intended to be and should not be construed as financial, economic, legal, accounting, tax or other advice.  For our full disclosure, click here.

 
HenryYoshida

ABOUT HENRY YOSHIDA

Henry is the CEO of Rocket Dollar, a fintech platform that lets individuals invest their IRA and old 401(k) funds into private and alternative investments such as real estate, crypto, crowdfunding, startups, and others. Henry previously founded Honest Dollar, which was acquired by Goldman Sachs in 2016 and founded a $2.5b assets under management investment consulting firm before that.

You can find out more details about Henry at his website: https://www.rocketdollar.com/

 
 
 
Business FundingNichole Stohlerpodcast, season 1