#184: Unlock Your Retirement Wealth with Self-Directed Accounts
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Are you frustrated with traditional IRAs and 401(k)s limiting your investment options? Do you wish you could use your retirement savings to invest in real estate, gold, or even Bitcoin? If so, this episode is for you!
Today on The Richer Geek Podcast, we sit down with Parker Pursell, President and CEO of eQRP, to explore his journey from a family-owned fertilizer business to leading a financial company that empowers investors to take control of their retirement funds. Learn how Parker transitioned from agriculture to finance and discover the innovative ways eQRP helps investors unlock the potential of their retirement savings.
In this episode, we’re discussing…
Self-Directed 401(k) vs. IRA: Learn why a self-directed 401(k) is often more advantageous than an IRA, particularly in debt-leveraged investments, where it can save you significant tax liabilities.
Alternative Investments: Understand how eQRP empowers investors to diversify their retirement portfolios with alternative assets like real estate, gold, and Bitcoin, without the limitations of traditional financial systems.
Financial Freedom through eQRP: Explore how eQRP is revolutionizing financial freedom by providing investors with the tools, education, and control needed to maximize their retirement savings.
Parker's Personal Journey: Get inspired by Parker Pursell's unconventional path from a family-owned fertilizer business to becoming a financial industry leader, emphasizing the importance of continuous learning and value-driven leadership.
Actionable Tips: Gain insights into strategic moves that could potentially save you hundreds of thousands in taxes by transitioning your IRA into a self-directed 401(k) with eQRP.
Resources from Parker
LinkedIn | eQRP | Turnkey Retirement
Resources from Mike and Nichole
+ Read the transcript
Mike Stohler
Everybody, welcome back to another episode of The Richer Geek Podcast. In today's episode, we have Parker Pursell. He's at the helm of eQRP as President & CEO. They are revolutionizing financial freedom with professionals and investors alike. They guide and steward people that you may not know. With the investing and we've talked about all these LPs and how you can put in money, we're going to talk a little bit about what you may or may not know about how you can facilitate. You may not think that you have enough money as a limited partnership, but we're going to talk about how you can actually gain leverage through something you probably already have. And so we're happy to talk about it. Parker, how are you doing?
Parker Pursell
Good.Thanks for having me on.
Mike Stohler
Yeah. So we're going to interesting conversation, and kind of, I think it'll be enlightening for people, because I think every working class person that has some type of, maybe middle class, upper middle class, white collar, has what we're going to talk about, and they don't realize that they can do what they're we're going to talk about. So before we get into the secret, tell us a little bit about who you are as a person and how you became president, CEO of eQRP.
Parker Pursell
Yeah, it's a little unconventional. I would say family business. We were in agriculture growing up here in Alabama for about 110 years. So we had a fertilizer technology that we built and developed and have a family farm here that we also moved our headquarters out to, built a golf course as a marketing arm for this fertilizer technology. Executed a strategy for about three years. What happened is it kind of caught wind of the industry, and probably the best marketing campaign we ever did, because we sold out in 2006 for nine figures, which was awesome for a family business that had never seen themselves, ever getting out of it. Fast forward, and I'm kind of going to go forward a little bit and back, because it'll tie the story together. So 2006, I was starting high school, graduated no nine and went to Auburn University, graduated with a marketing degree and started work at Chick-fil-A. So I was there for about three years, and wanted to go be an operator. That was what I kind of saw myself doing and really learned a lot about myself professionally. Kind of got to cut my teeth on leadership, business acumen, you name it. But in the meantime, since the sale of the fertilizer business, we kind of had this, I call it the Moses wandering in the desert, like we didn't really know where we were going next or what we were doing. We were kind of just, you know, burning a lot of cash trying to keep these assets out on the farm going with no strategy.
My father, who's just an incredible visionary, was like, "Okay, well, hospitality was really kind of how we built our fertilizer business, and the way we executed our strategy, we actually called it weaponizing Southern hospitality." What we did is we basically said that we're just going to get into the hospitality business. We already had some assets out there.M dad unveiled this massive, like charette and architectural designs of what he was going to do.I am at Chick-fil-A watching this unfold. I was like, "Man, I want to be a part of that." I was going to have some FOMO, the place I grew up. And I'm going to watch all this unfold, like I want to be a part of helping them, but at the same time, want to go be an operator. So I chased the Chick-fil-A thing and just said, "God bless her, kill it." That was kind of my prayer. And led me back to the family business. For about four years, I got to help my dad open this new facility and kind of get it running. And it was great. Learned a lot, and then COVID hit, obviously, a lot of stories in COVID. And so really hit a point in my life, though, where I felt like I had tapped out, like being back to the family business, obviously the pressure of COVID, not knowing what was going to happen, and I knew that there's a lot ahead of me, that there's still a lot of things I wanted to learn. And the one big thing that I found in my life, which was a massive gap, was I grew up, learned a lot of really great values from my parents, grew up around a lot, but knew what it took to build it. But the only thing that I didn't understand was how the money works. I watched my dad and granddad build this thing and accumulate there's this massive gap of understanding, like, "How do you get from here to here?" When I stepped into unemployment, I kind of took a bet on myself. I was like, "I don't really know where I'm going or what I'm going to do."
I wanted to lighten the load on the business, but I knew I wanted to go out and learn. So I pressure washed for about eight months, cut grass, just paid bills, figured it out. My wife, she's amazing. She was very supportive during that time. She's a fitness coach. But it was a great time for me to go check out what's out there and test a lot. Long story short, I ended up coming across the eQRP, and what I saw as an opportunity for me to put my hands on something and build. I'm a builder by nature. I don't really like to put myself in a cubicle. I'll literally kill myself if I have to do that. I just came alongside this mission of breaking financial shackles, and saw an opportunity for me to take all my experience and help build this company and grow it, and also for myself financially, understand how money worked. I knew what it was, just didn't know how it worked. And so getting in like this, culture really shifted and changed my perspective on learning all the creative ways that money worked through these investors that we were meeting, watching them get into different deals, understanding how deals worked, all the creative ways to get money and secure it. I got the opportunity last year to become president and then CEO this year, and it's weird because I never saw myself in finance, and I'm just a student. I still feel so privileged to be around the people that I am, and the people that I work alongside are amazing. They make my job really easy. But I'm just a student like we all are when it comes to investing and learning about money. I just like to stay curious. And so here I am today, just a very curious individual that is just figuring it out, like most people are.
Mike Stohler
What we're getting ready to take the cat out of the hat, what you're doing, what eQRP everybody has. Most of the people that probably listening have IRAs or one Ks. What is it that people don't realize that you can do if you're sitting on this kind of nest egg? You know? It's just kind of sitting there waiting for you to pull stuff out. Talk to us a little bit about what eQRP does and this kind of hidden thing that people may or may not realize that you can do with it.
Parker Pursell
Yeah. So eQRP, we focus on self directed retirement. So that is our specific niche, and how we serve the industry as a whole. And our mission is to break financial shackles, and so we do that by empowering families to invest in the assets that make the most sense for them, in the vehicle that they use is a self directed retirement account. So most people that hear that term in the traditional finance sense, and kind of where it's broken is that you go to your advisor, you go to your company 401(k)well, I want to be self direct. Like, "Okay, cool. We'll let you do it." But it's just you get more of the same. You just get to pick it versus them picking it for you. Therefore you're self-directing. But most people, especially listening to this or no. Like, when I say self direct, I want to put it into another asset class, like real estate or gold or Bitcoin or whatever the thing is.
You have to understand first that the traditional system keeps people trapped by limiting their options because they're like Wall Street's kind of like just continuing to funnel itself, to stay around, but there's a lot of money that's wanting to move into Main Street assets and kind of the offerings that you got right so most people do not know that if you've ever worked at a job and left if you have a traditional IRA, you can roll all those accounts over into a self directed retirement account and have true control. So the eQRP is built on a 401(k) platform, because it serves the self-directed investor that likes alternative assets with the least amount of friction possible, because you're your own custodian of your assets. You don't have to ask permission. You've got total control of your bank account. And then so, for instance, Mike was like, "Hey, Parker, I got this opportunity right here. It's going to be gone tomorrow, but I just wanted to offer it to you, in goodwill, because I have a tool that allows me to act very fast." I could just wire you that money in five minutes and not have to ask permission and put that money to work. And so as we know, a lot of these opportunities, as they come, time is everything. You miss an opportunity because you're waiting, then you could actually miss out on , in perpetuity, hundreds of 1000s of dollars for your financial confidence in your future that you've been waiting for. So that's how we serve the market. Is with the self directed retirement vehicle.
Mike Stohler
For those people that now are, let's say they do this, they invest with something that you have. Let's say,I have self directed IRA people that invest in my hotels with me. How does it work, tax wise? And the kind of thing is, some people are like going, "Yeah, but am I taxed on?" How does that work?
Parker Pursell
Yeah. So money inside of retirement plans is basically taxed at a later date, right? So think of it as kicking the can, and you're taxed at your income tax rate level whenever you take distributions, right? That's how they were set up. And just like your money outside, there's two different tax kinds of plays working right? So you're not paying capital gains, or really any taxes on the returns that you get inside your account. You're just kind of growing it, and then at some point you're going to pay those returns back when you start taking distributions. And then, obviously, money on the outside just works a different way.
Okay, an important thing to remember is not all tools are created equal, so the two most common tools here in the self directed retirement space are a self directed IRA and a self directed 401(k). But they're not equal. And truthfully, the reason that we're focused on this 401(k) platform is because it serves the investor better because of the tax implications that are involved.
So I'm going to give your listeners just a really quick tip, when you're considering the vehicle that you're using, the IRA, has a clause in it that if you are investing with a self directed IRA in a deal that's got debt leveraged on it, then you're going to be paying a tax. So let's just say you've got an 80% loan to value, debt structure in place, and then your profits that you receive are going to be that 80% of your profits is going to be taxed at the same level of your debt that you took on. So 80% debt, 80% of your profits are now taxed at 37% that you're going to give back to Uncle Sam, just because you're using a self directed IRA. But now what we really educate people about is the 401(k), what happens is that clause is not even in the bylaws of section 401 so if you just transfer your IRA over into a 401(k) now you completely get out of having to pay that tax in perpetuity. Instead of paying 10s of 1000s of dollars in taxes a year on your distributions, well, then now you recoup that money and you can put it towards the next opportunity as it comes.You're talking about a move that saves you hundreds of 1000s of dollars down the road just because one tiny piece of information. But these custodians aren't going to tell you that. Why would they? They aren't incentivized to. But this is all about giving you more control and helping you secure your financial future in the education piece is so critical, and that's what's at stake when you're using these tools is understanding how they work.
Mike Stohler
Yeah. And I'm writing down all these notes,because I'm like, "Oh, I do the same thing as if I have an IRA? Is it a 401(k)?"I don't even know. But you're not just eQRP and your either sister companies, brother companies, whatever you want to, however you want to call it. You're just not a third party facilitator for that. You actually kind of guide people. And what else do you do? Because there's all these different companies out there that just, this is where it sits. They bill me every month, and it's just, I can't touch my money?And they just do it. But you guys are a little bit different.
Parker Pursell
Yeah. We take a very active approach with our members. We serve about 2,300 people, growing nationwide. And really our whole goal is this, is that the industry, in and of itself, gives you the basic control, meaning you can go find the tool anywhere, for next to nothing, off the shelf kind of thing, but what you're stuck with is all the things after that, like all the questions that come with, well, what can I do? What can I invest in? Like, how can I do this? For us, what we've built on the back end, like we specialize in brain surgery, because we take all the damage out of it, like for the investor. And what we've learned is that there's three components to everybody that's using a self-directed retirement account. What they need is a place to network. So they need a community. They need a place to educate themselves on all the things that you can do right or can't do, or meet other people in there, which is where the networking takes effect in there too, and the opportunity. So for us, we've really kind of taken it the extra mile for these investors, because we understand that if your money's not moving, then you're not winning, and that's the whole reason you do it in the first place. So you make this move, and then you just stay stuck like you were before, because you don't have all the resources you need. So we're more like coaches. You've got account managers, you've got people reaching out to you, saying, "Hey, tell us what's going on. What are you invested in? Are you thinking about doing anything? Do you have any money sitting stagnant?"
Like we just have to continue the conversation with people, and that's where we're really good, is taking a very hands on approach with investors and also providing them opportunities. So it's also cool that we've built this deal marketplace for our community with our relationships that we have with syndicators across the country, to be able to offer different deals that are open, and it could be anything. And that's kind of like I said, our mission is not to get in the way, but we want them to invest in the assets that make the most sense for them. So some people may want to learn about hotels and have no idea how they work, or they may never hear about it if someone doesn't present it, or investing in golf courses or investing in mobile home or RV parks like so we're all about providing the opportunity for people to keep their money moving and asking the question, and that's where people win, because when they see their money working for them in these alternative investments that we know consistently outperform Wall Street year over year, it's like, well, this is how we help people win and get to where they want to go and really address that fundamental need and that critical point in their life where they're like, I'm so frustrated with how things are currently going, I know there's a better way now we can help them secure that better way moving forward.
Mike Stohler
You can correct me, if I'm wrong, by keeping it in the IRA while you're still working and you're making hundreds of 1000s dollars, you're making a really good income, you're not taxed because it's staying there. You're not taxed at your current salary. Wait till you retire. Now you're unemployed, and now you start taking the distributions, yep, and now you're taxed at a much lower, lower rate than it would if I just put part of my checking account or savings account in to invest?
Parker Pursell
Yep, yeah, absolutely. I mean, there's so many creative ways that we work with people, and it's just, like I said, through the education piece of helping them get the thing that they want, and a lot of times it just comes with, what are you trying to accomplish? Like, let's just get a picture of your reality, of what you're trying to do, and then say, "Okay, what are we then working with? Right? So the retirement piece is just one part of it, there may be other components of their financial life that come and play that we can help them accomplish their goals. That's the fun piece of what we get to do is we actually get in the mud with them and really help them wrestle through achieving their goals. But no other company is really doing that. They're just reading a call sheet. Here you go and call your CPA, call your lawyer, call your whatever, and that's not what they want to hear. So that's where I feel like we win in this space and help our people.
Mike Stohler
And it seems like you're a lot more, it might be that the small town Alabama, I'm small town Indiana.
Parker Pursell
Yeah.
Mike Stohler
You just have a fun accent than me, but we're probably the same.
Parker Pursell
Yeah.
Mike Stohler
And I'm just kidding about that, but it's that personal. I get that. eQRP and what you do and what I do is more personal. It's more interactive. People aren't just numbers.
Parker Pursell
Yeah and that's the most annoying thing, too, right? Because, and think about this, when it comes to investing, I think this is a kind of a critical piece too. That we're seeing is that we're watching people care more about where their money is at the value centered investing approach. If I go put ten million in the Tesla, guess what? Ain't nobody picking up my phone call. If I give them a buzz and say, "Hey, like, what are you guys doing?" They're just going to be like, shut up. You got your stocks,whatever. But if I give you ten million for an opportunity, guess who's going to be picking up my phone? Who's going to be taking me to go see all the different like, that's into like, you get to see the thing that your money's like, actually doing like. Here's what your investment was able to provide. Like that is more fulfilling to investors these days, but if you don't have control over that, then you'll never be able to experience that.
Mike Stohler
Yeah, that is so true. That's something that my investors have told me is that I am a text, I am an email, I'm a call away. I have meetings with them personally, and that's just something that it's just, why wouldn't I you know? And maybe it's that maybe my mind and your mind is, is that way. It's like, of course, I'm going to be.
Parker Pursell
Yeah.
Mike Stohler
They're giving me money. And you want to build that relationship, so that they come back and you would be successful. They want to be able to see that they can get ahold of the GP, or the owner of the company, President of the company, and just ask questions, so good. So what's the website, eQRP? And then once they get on that website, talk to us a little bit about how they can navigate, how they can learn how they come involved,
Parker Pursell
Yeah. So you can just go to our website, eqrp.com, sign up for a time to talk with our team and just know, like the approach is not a robotic approach, like we really kind of just deep dive deep into your personal situation, what you're trying to accomplish, and then be able to kind of walk you through how we maybe can help you on your investing journey. Very simple. It starts with a phone call. I do have a newsletter that I send out every week. It's called turnkeyretirement.com and they're just factoids of what's happening in the market, things that I find interesting. So I really, it's been a really fun place for me to just kind of say, here's some really interesting things happening as you're looking to invest. And you know, no matter what the money is like, it's all connected, right? So as you're considering and pondering investing, the more information that you have just helps you make better decisions. That's the purpose of the newsletter, and you can sign up for it's free. And we'd love to have that conversation with you if you're considering that absolutely.
Mike Stohler
And you know, everybody's I know it's enlightening for some people. Some people probably. But it is a fantastic way. You're not draining your savings account. The money's already an investment vehicle.
Parker Pursell
Yeah.
Mike Stohler
Right there. It's prime, it's there. And it's not like you're taking anything out of your day to day life, your savings or you're just diversifying.
Parker Pursell
Yeah, and people look at that money,I don't want people to look at this money as dead money on some level, because they're like this is for a later date. So they look at it as if I'm not going to have it now. I'm going to get it at a later time. But if you are a good steward of that and can take it and grow it in a meaningful way, your 55 year old self is going to be thanking your 30-40, year old self for taking action today. So look, if you've job hopped around, if you've got a side hustle going on, or you've been laid off, whatever, the thing is, you're a prime candidate, especially if you're in tech or in healthcare. Some of these industries that have a lot of movement like you have so much hanging out there that you don't even know about, you can start putting to work in these opportunities. So just have a phone call. It's like low risk, no problem in doing that
Mike Stohler
Absolutely and where else can people find your Parker?
Parker Pursell
I'm active on LinkedIn. That's really kind of where I hang out. I don't really do too much else on any other social personally, it's just like too much distraction out there.
Mike Stohler
Are you kidding me? Oh my God. Well, Parker, it's been a pleasure. And before we leave, today's episode is brought to you by REI Words. Your go-to SEO agency for increasing traffic to your website. Check it out at reiwords.com
Parker, it's been a pleasure. Thank you so much for coming on The Richer Geek, have a blessed evening.
Parker Pursell
You as well. Thanks for having me on.
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ABOUT PARKER PURSELL
Parker Pursell, President & CEO of eQRP, is redefining financial freedom for professionals and investors. With a foundation built at Chick-Fil-A and Pursell Farms, Parker made a bold shift to finance during the COVID-19 pandemic. Now, just three years later, he's leading eQRP, empowering thousands to take control of their retirement funds. Guided by Steward Leadership, Parker is dedicated to fostering growth and financial empowerment, ensuring a future where financial freedom is within everyone's reach. His commitment to transforming lives through innovative financial solutions is leaving a lasting impact.