The premise
Your retirement account is allowed to own a building. It always was.
Real estate has been a permissible IRA asset since IRAs were created in 1974. The reason it feels exotic is that Fidelity, Schwab, and Vanguard will not hold it for you, so almost nobody has seen it done. That is a business decision by those firms, not a rule in the tax code.
This is the desk that explains the whole thing properly: which custodians actually do it, how the money moves, what it costs, when a tax-advantaged account still owes tax, and the handful of ordinary-looking mistakes that destroy an account entirely.
No hype, no loopholes, no affiliate rankings. We are not a custodian and we do not sell you an account.
The weekly letterOne letter a week on holding real estate inside a retirement account. The mechanics, the tripwires, and what changed. No hype, and you can leave in one click.
Or skip ahead: read The Guide, the whole sequence in one page. Or tell us where you stand and get the version that applies to you.
Start here
- What is a self-directed IRA, really?
A self-directed IRA is an ordinary IRA held at a custodian that is willing to hold assets other than stocks, bonds, and funds. The tax ...
- Can I buy real estate with my Fidelity IRA?
No. Fidelity does not hold direct real estate in retirement accounts. That is Fidelity's business decision, not a tax rule. To buy a bu...
- Prohibited transactions: the rules that can destroy the whole account
A prohibited transaction is almost any dealing between your IRA and a disqualified person, which includes you. The penalty is not a fin...
- UDFI: what a mortgage does to your IRA's taxes
UDFI is unrelated debt-financed income. When your IRA buys property with borrowed money, the percentage of the income attributable to t...
- Non-recourse loans: how an IRA borrows money
Your IRA can borrow, but only on a non-recourse basis, meaning the property is the lender's only collateral and you cannot personally g...
- Solo 401k or self-directed IRA for real estate?
If you have self employment income, the solo 401k usually wins, and not by a little. It avoids UDFI on leveraged real property, allows ...
The library
20 pages and growing every week. Organized the way the questions actually arrive.
What a self-directed account is, what it can hold, and what it cannot.
Who actually holds the account, what they do, what they charge, and where the big brokerages stop.
Rollovers, funding, titling, closing, and the paperwork order that trips people up.
Prohibited transactions, disqualified persons, and the mistakes that disqualify an account.
When a tax-advantaged account owes tax anyway, and who decides.
Debt inside an account, non-recourse lending, valuations, and required distributions.
Account types, structures, and the paths side by side.
Who writes this
The publication is the author. There is no host, no guru, and no invented byline. It is written by people who own and operate real buildings, which is why the pages spend as much time on the furnace fund and the custodian's processing queue as on the tax code. More about the desk.