1. Opening Scaling Tension
Mat Sorensen spent years as an attorney representing self-directed IRA companies — the same companies that are now his competitors. He was good at it. Good enough that when one of the businesses he advised sold for a hundred million dollars, he realized something uncomfortable: he knew that company’s operations better than the people who ran it. He was billing hours as the expert in the room, while the value he was creating accrued entirely to someone else’s balance sheet.
That’s the tension most founder-led firms eventually hit. Revenue climbs, the calendar fills, and the founder becomes indispensable in exactly the way that caps growth — every decision, every client relationship, every fire still routes back through one person’s bandwidth. Being excellent at the work and building a scalable business turn out to be two different disciplines, and the first one can quietly block the second.
2. The Hidden Constraint
The constraint isn’t market size, capital, or even headcount. It’s decision load. Sorensen put it plainly: trading time for money is a structurally poor way to build wealth, because every hour spent executing is an hour not spent building the systems, roles, and judgment infrastructure that let the business run without him in the room. The expertise that makes a founder valuable also makes him a bottleneck — every unresolved question, every exception, every client issue defaults back to the person who “knows how this works.” That’s not a bandwidth problem you fix by working later. It’s an execution systems problem, and it compounds as volume grows.
3. The Operating Shift
The shift Sorensen made wasn’t “delegate more.” It was narrower and more durable: identify the three functions the business could not survive without, and permanently assign ownership of each — before adding anything else. For Directed IRA, that was financial and compliance control (the company is licensed, regulated, and audited, so this function is pure risk management), operational execution (service delivery clients could rely on independently of him), and customer acquisition (the one function he kept for himself, because a good structure with no customers doesn’t work).
This is the core operating principle underneath everything else in the conversation: leverage doesn’t come from doing more. It comes from building a decision-making framework where each critical function has a single accountable owner, so decisions get made once, by the right person, instead of re-litigated every time volume increases.
4. Execution in Practice
Four insights from the conversation show how that principle gets operationalized.
A minimum viable org structure, not an org chart built by instinct. Sorensen started with exactly three hires — a controller, a paralegal, and himself running sales — because those were the three functions the business could not scale without. Everything added later got layered onto that foundation rather than replacing it.
Shedding responsibility in phases, deliberately. Directed IRA opened roughly 500 accounts in its first year. It now opens over a thousand a month. That volume didn’t get absorbed by working harder — it got absorbed by continuously offloading tasks the founder had been doing personally. Sorensen frames this as becoming a different “version of yourself” at each stage: the dynamic generalist early on, then someone who actively sheds work as the business can support it. The operating discipline here is recognizing that the tasks worth removing from your plate change as you scale, and waiting too long to remove them is what creates the bottleneck, not the growth itself.
Relationship-vetted hiring over open recruiting. Eight of Sorensen’s ten-person leadership team never applied for a job. He hired people he’d already watched perform, under real conditions, over years. That’s a risk-management decision as much as a hiring one — it collapses the ongoing verification cycle most founders run informally every time they wonder if a new hire is actually going to own their role, because the track record already exists before day one.
A risk-versus-goodwill trade-off on brand. Sorensen is explicit that Directed IRA has sacrificed short-term growth and margin to protect service quality. The logic is a capital allocation decision dressed up as a values statement: a strong brand generates referral-driven customers at close to zero acquisition cost, while a damaged one forces permanent, expensive advertising spend to compensate. He’s seen both models in his industry. One compounds; the other bleeds cash indefinitely.
5. Leverage Outcome
Put together, these choices reframe leverage correctly: it’s expanded capacity, not extended hours. Sorensen calls Directed IRA a human capital business — payroll is its largest expense line, ahead of any other cost — which means the entire growth model depends on how well roles are structured and owned, not on how many hours anyone puts in. Scaling discipline, in his account, is really leadership bandwidth protection: deciding in advance which decisions deserve the founder’s attention and building everything else so it doesn’t need to reach him at all.
Connect With the Guest
To learn more about Mat Sorensen and his work:
Website: https://directedira.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matsorensen/
The Immediate Move
The constraint on your business right now is very likely not capital, headcount, or demand — it’s how many decisions still have to pass through you before anything moves. Structure beats effort here: a role with clear ownership and defined judgment criteria eliminates the same decision from ever needing to be made twice. That’s the actual mechanism behind operational leverage, and it’s also the fastest way to protect the one resource you can’t buy back — your own bandwidth.
Watch this before you hire your next support role.
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Full Podcast Transcript
All right, listeners, quick question. What do you think your retirement account is doing for you right now besides sitting there while you hope that the market’s kind to it?
Because here on Scale Smart Grow Fast, we like to poke at that assumption a little bit, since those dollars can actually go to work in real estate, private funds, or all kinds of
alternative assets if you know about how to do that. And my guest today has basically built this amazing empire and company around showing people how to do that.
He also gets that once things start growing fast, you need real execution behind it. He’s got an amazing team helping him at directed IRA. And that’s what we like to help people build with full-time ultimate executive assistants here at Worker Genetics. So please welcome Matt Sorensen, the founder and CEO of Directed IRA and Directed Trust Company, and the guy who literally wrote the book on self-directed IRAs. So let’s get into it. Matt, thanks for joining me today.
Thanks, Adrian. Thanks for having me. Pleasure to be here talking about, you know, directed IRA, my baby. you know, you have a business owner come on talking about their business. They could talk your ear off all day just like they can about their own kids. So excited to be here.
Well, let’s get started at the beginning before directed IRA really took off. When you were at the start, you know, grinding it out as an entrepreneur. What did a normal week actually look l for like for you back then?
Well, for me, I mean, I was actually a lawyer helping clients investing with self-directed IRAs. I was representing a lot of self-directed IRA companies, banks and trust companies that are now my competitors. So I was working just as hard, just doing different things. You know, I was a an attorney billing hours. And quite honestly, I had seen a company in my industry sell for a hundred million dollars. And I was like, wait a second, I advised that company.
I knew more about their business than they did. I felt like I was more of an expert. And here I am billing hours. And I thought, I’m in the right industry, but I got the wrong business billing hours as a lawyer. So that was honestly the impetus is just that work as a lawyer, becoming an expert, knowing the business and understanding the customer, and then seeing a company have success. So that’s what my day looked like. It was kind of doing the same stuff, but just in a different way as a lawyer advising clients on tax and legal stuff.
Right. And I love how you really highlight there that you were, you know, you were billing for hours, right? You were doing what we, you know, think of as like trading hours for dollars, and you realized
Yeah.
that you could instead work on building a business where the value would exceed more than just your hourly rate.
Yeah, I mean trading time for money is like the worst way to, you know, earn a living. I mean, you can scale it, of course, and get other people that they’re trading their time for money and you’re making margin on that. And that that that works. I mean, there’s plenty of businesses like that. but as a professional, I think a lot of professionals realize this. It’s like, how do I make more money? Well, you work more and you get into this rut of just
kind of trading your time for money. And it’s well, quite honestly, it can be a little frustrating when you try to get some work life balance. if there if there even is a thing. But anywho, yeah, that was my that was kind of a realization for me of I didn’t like the way my life looked at that point and the way that business was building compared to other companies I could start and something like what we’re doing at directed IRA.
Perfect. And so I think that kind of sets the the framework for the rest of our conversation today, because I think what we’ll talk about first is how you’ve built directed IRA and how our listeners can think about building a business where you know you’re a business owner and you’re making money when other people work, right? And not just your
Yeah.
own billable hours. And then we’re also gonna get into how people can make money with their money, right? With investing like in self-directed
Mm-hmm.
IRAs. Does that sound like a good plan?
Love it, sounds great.
All right. So let’s first talk about you building out directed IRA and some of the takeaways that our business owner, entrepreneur listeners can have for that. So as you focused instead of just billable hours as an attorney and you started building this company, what are some of the first things that you stopped doing yourself and started outsourcing to other people so that you could become this business owner and not just trade your own hours for dollars?
Yeah, I mean, I think at first, I mean, we started with three people, you know. So, I took a controller from my law firm, young guy with an MBA, getting his CPA license, who’s now the CFO, and I took a paralegal in my law firm that had worked directly for me for probably seven years, super experienced. We worked well together, had a lot of great operational stuff. And it was just the three of us that started. So
I I knew that I needed someone to handle the kind of the financial details. I mean, we’re we’re licensed, regulated, audited, all of that. Like you can’t like mess up or you lose your ability to do business. I needed operational execution. And then my job is really the sales and marketing. Like, you know, you can have the greatest, best you know, structure and people and processes and technology, but if you can’t acquire customers, it isn’t gonna work.
So I was out there kind of doing the customer acquisition, not actually opening the accounts, but just spending the time building the relationships, making the sales, opening the accounts. and and that’s how it started. I mean, but you know, even in our first year, I don’t think we didn’t even open up 500 accounts. I think it kinda took us a little over a year to get to 500 accounts.
We’ve opened up over a thousand accounts a month now. So like we’ve came a long way from where we started just seven years ago. But it was really about figuring out what were the what were the core things that the business needed to function. and it was really solving it first on day one, kind of those those three pieces. I needed some sales and marketing, I needed some operational execution that customers could rely on, and I needed the finance accounting and the dollars and cents that we had of other people’s money.
to make sure that they were adding up and and and and flowing properly.
I think there’s a lot of great takeaways in what you shared already there, Matt. Like it’s a snowball. That’s what I think about when you’re saying, you know, now you open twice as many per accounts per month as you opened in an over an entire year. And so it
Yeah.
takes some time to get that ball rolling for new companies.
How do I?
So for somebody who’s in that stage where they’re still working to get to get it rolling, what wisdom would you have for them?
I I think like the the first thing is is there’s gonna be different versions of yourself in the phases of your business. And the first version of yourself that the business needs is you need to be pretty dynamic and be able to do a lot of things until you get to a point where you have enough customers and business to where you then need to start shedding responsibilities to scale to where, you know, we we are doing twice as much in a month we were doing in a year.
So I I think at at first when you’re in kind of this first version of maybe it’s you or you and a couple of people, whether these are contracted out, these are assistants, these are, you know, I think even like hiring your first assistant for for many people is like an important first step is you’ve got to get like that customer acquisition down. You’ve got to figure out what are the core services that need to be offered. And and then you’re likely providing them, possibly.
but then maybe get your administrative duties off the table. I mean, everybody’s got a different thing. I knew from day one I had to go for it. I was like, I’m gonna get at least two people, like highly skilled people that I’ve worked with for years. I didn’t post to do a job posting. I recruited everybody individually who I wanted because I’ve worked with people over the years. And and so this is kind of the first phase is like it everybody’s different. And I’ll and and I’ll say that. The other thing I would say is, what are you good at?
Like you’ve got to get really honest with yourself about what you’re good at and what you’re bad at. And find people that can supplement what you’re bad at and can make up for your weaknesses. Hire that. and focus on what you’re good at so long as that can drive revenue and value in the business.
Right. A lot of great takeaways there. I love how and you bring up a good point. And I see entrepreneurs need this, right? They need to hear when you get started, you are gonna have to wear all of those hats. And yet as you grow, then you can start to build your team. And people create issues when they go to the extremes in either one. Either they get too top heavy, they build too much of a team too early, or they need a team. They’ve gotten that that they’ve scaled and they don’t bring the team on. And so you kind of
we’re
able
Yeah.
to walk that middle line relatively successfully obviously because the company’s done great now.
Yeah, and I think, you know, there’s there’s not a right or wrong way. I think some some people will wait too long to bring on other people. And even a lot of small businesses that might have ten employees, you know, the business owners frankly taking too much money out of the business than they should and should be reinvesting and and focusing more on growth.
but they get comfortable with a certain, you know, standard of living and you know, they wanted all the financial rewards of the business. And now they hit a certain level and they just start draining the business and not reinvesting like they were on day one. So, so so this is not like a day one problem. This is a problem you’ll always have in the business when you’re scaling. So, but I think some people wait too long to hire and they stunt the growth of the business because of that. Other people h hire too fast and they’re they’re
They’re losing out on profitability and margin that they could get in the business. And so like s some people are like, Do you need the income? Like, how much can you risk also? And so I, you know, we used this is why, you know, there’s so many successful tech companies of people in their twenties. They can go all in. They live in a dorm.
Right.
They live at their parents’ house. They have four roommates, you know. They don’t need
Mm-hmm.
to they’re not taking money out of the business. They’re all in, they’re putting their time and money into it. So,
So I know there I don’t think there’s a there’s a right or wrong way for it. You gotta figure it out for yourself, but have some self awareness. That’s like, you know, understanding yourself and having some self awareness is probably the most important thing.
Mm-hmm. That’s very good. very good point. So something as we talk about hiring, talking about building the team, something I know
Yeah.
that a lot of our listeners have talked about as a challenge right now is is the hiring. Getting somebody on your team who’s really gonna own their responsibilities instead of just like checking a box, being like, Yep, I did it, I did it.
So what insights would you have about hiring or onboarding people to your team so that they actually own their role and their responsibilities?
Yeah, I think I think a lot of business owners think in terms of like what they need. they need to be thinking of what does their employee need? Like if I’m hiring someone, what does that person want? What are they expecting? what am I offering them? You know, like what’s the opportunity for them? I mean, seriously, like you gotta like if if you want good people.
You’ve got to be willing to answer that and have a really good answer for that. Like, what is your sales pitch? Seriously, if you’re writing job postings and and not and getting like terrible candidates or people that aren’t what you’re looking for, you need to kind of rethink. Well, like, well, who am I looking for? I think a lot of small businesses, and and I’ve had to do this and many other companies I’ve owned to, is is you can’t afford you know, everybody’s like, hire an A player. Well, duh.
You know, like I if I could just get like five LeBron Jameses on my team, I’d do that too. Like even the Lakers can’t afford that, you know, or whoever wherever he’s playing now. I don’t know. You know what I mean? Like, duh. Okay. So so like, okay, well, okay, I’m gonna go get eight players. But when you’re starting out and you’re brand new small business, how do I get those people? What what I did, the nice thing about my pathway at least.
Is I met a lot of people over my career that I liked working with. I had been a lawyer for 15, 20 years, and I had been in the space, well known. I had met people. So those first two people I hired, I’d worked with them before. I recruited them. They believed in me. They trusted me. They were starting the they were this is a brand new company, you know. They were leaving a law firm to go work at. So, but
So I really built my team through a lot of personal relationships and people that I knew that I knew were excellent at what they did. And this was really important because it it leads to the next phases that are critical in the business. So I then went and recruited a COO in my company who was a guy I met that was running events in my industry. I would speak at his events. He understood sales and marketing. He could fill a room of people. And I’m like, I need that on my team. It took me two years to get him to join.
He’s our COO now, right now. and then we did an event, one of our own events, and I had about 10 people up from my team. We did a little team picture. This is part of our leadership team here. And I want to say, like, eight of those 10 people didn’t apply for a job. Like they did not even apply for a job. They were people that I knew or someone else on the team knew that brought him in and said, You need to work here. So
I think you can lean on your personal relationships, people that you know, but but they’ve got to be sold on you and the vision that you’re trying to build. And I think you need to think about what does this mean for them? Like what’s in it for them? And if you can answer that, you can attract and retain really good people. Now, after that, if you get a core group of people that are great, that are good at what they do, your company’s gonna thrive. Your customers are gonna like you.
Other people that you hire later are gonna like working with them because they’re gonna be like, this is a cool place to work. People here are really good at their job. Their customers love this business. You know, it becomes part of your culture now. So easier said than done, but that has probably been one of, if not the most important piece of our success, is getting a really strong core team who was good at what they did, who liked working with each other, that created this.
love that our customers have for us that have differentiated us in the marketplace and that also created a really good culture for anyone else who joined the team, whether you’re no matter where you are in the organizational structure of where it’s like, these are actually really great people. I enjoy coming to work and I like, I like what this company’s doing.
That’s a lot a lot of good wisdom in that. Thank you so much, Matt. That’s fabulous. Now,
Mm-hmm.
I’m curious, because we talked about the beginning. You talked a lot about your growth. I’m curious how many years has it been? And now you told us a lot what it was like at the beginning. You know, you’re having to be dynamic, you’re having to wear a lot of these hats. What does your day to day look like now compared to that?
it’s it’s a little different, you know, like I don’t talk to people like customers at all anymore, really. I mean very rarely. So I would say a lot of my time is spent in management functions, obviously, with the leadership team, with other managers. I’m very connected to the marketing team and still part of marketing and customer acquisition, imp important relationships. And another big piece is is like recruiting.
employees and and recruiting team members. we had a period of growth where we were hiring an employee every few weeks, you know, and we were tr really trying to be diligent and getting good people. so I spent a lot of time just recruiting. and I think that’s I think as a business owner, you’ve got to, you know, like we’re a human capital business. Our largest expense item is payroll. We’re not like a, you know,
capital intensive business. We’re not like buying a lot of inventory, right? We’re providing a service and and accounts. But payroll is our number one expense item. And so it’s important for us in our profit margins, but it’s also it’s like critical in of the delivery of services. Like our customers are in the end working with a person. So so so I think nailing your people is is big. And so I spent a lot of time on that. But from
beginning to now and and it just gets more and more intensified the the the larger I get.
Right. that’s I think really helpful for from like a meta perspective of of course for any business, we really a through line from a lot of your your answers has been the importance of like that marketing piece, right? Of making sure that your client understands the value you’re providing and then the back end piece of making sure that you’re doing a quality job of providing it.
Yeah, and that’s your brand, you know, like the service you end up providing becomes your brand. And, you know, we we we grew so fast and we’ve been on the Inc. 5000 list four years in a row. we’ve grown tremendously fast. And when you do that, if you screw it up, you’re gonna mess up your brand. And every industry, you’ve got a brand reputation. And I’d been in my industry long enough to know the companies that had a good reputation and the one whose reputation sucked. And I was like very
Right.
Like I’m like, we are not gonna screw this up. We are gonna have the best brand in the industry. And and and I think that’s what we’ve built. But being you have to be like intentional about that. And we’ve sacrificed growth for that. Like we could have grown faster, actually. We had sacrifice growth for that in the short term because we wanted to make sure that we were delivering a high level of service and some margins too. I mean, you could obviously we could be jamming through more customers at a lower service level and be making more money.
But in the long in the end of the day, there’s not much the the brand is gonna suffer for that. And so, so yeah, I mean it’s there’s just all these different levers in the business and things you gotta think about. I don’t want to get like too theoretical here, but you know, I I don’t care whether you’re a plumbing contractor or, you know, whatever you’re doing and you’re thinking, all right, I need to hire more plumbers. how can I get more margin out of this? I can pay them less.
I can have them do more work. I can charge the customer more. I mean, you have a lot of decisions to make there, but you if in the long run, like if you can make some short term decisions there that might look good on an Excel spreadsheet and and on your bottom line, but in the long run, your brand’s gonna suffer. And now what do you gotta do? You gotta market twice as hard to overcome that crappy brand.
Because if the brand’s strong, they’re gonna recommend their friends. You’re gonna get a lot of free revenue in the future if you build a strong brand. Whereas if you don’t, you’re gonna have to go pay. And now you’re bleeding money out on advertising and marketing expense to get customer acquisition because your brand sucks. and there’s a lot of companies in my industry that have to do that. They’re the ones advertising all over everywhere because their natural customers they get aren’t gonna refer their friends and family.
You know, I had an episode a few weeks back, Matt, with a a property manager and turnkey company in the real estate investing space who does zero advertising because they have their core client group and they get referrals and that brings them plenty of business. And I had just gone to a a conference where there were a lot of their competitors who were paying a lot of money to have fancy
Yeah.
booths at that conference. And it was a good a good contrast between the points that you’re making.
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean there’s really there’s so many different ways to to build a business. And, you know, you’re gonna have different strengths. So obviously everybody’s gonna have their different strengths, but I would not lose sight of your brand and what’s the brand value that you have. I know it seems, you know, when you’re if you’re star starting out and smaller, it’s like, yeah, that doesn’t seem that big of a deal. But as as you start trying to retain your customers and grow your customer base, it’s like this.
free gift of new customers that you get and that you don’t have to go pay for, like like the property manager you’re talking about that doesn’t have to advertise.
Right.
Well, that’s been a lot of great wisdom, I think, to help our entrepreneur audience think about how they could build a business, become a business owner, and make money off of the business and not just their own hours. I’d love to shift gears and talk about that second piece that we mentioned at the beginning, how you entrepreneurs can have their money make the money for them. And let’s dive into self-directed IRAs. You know, I have had a self-directed IRA for years. we use it for our our private money lending within the real estate space.
Yeah.
And
I think it’s fabulous and a not a lot of people know about it. So for our business owners who’ve never used one, can you give an introduction of like what is a self directed IRA, this service that you provide to people?
Yeah. So essentially what a self-directed IRA is, it’s an IRA that can invest in any asset allowed by law. So most people think of an IRA or 401k buying a stock or a mutual fund. Like that’s the investment, right? And your your IRA or 401k goes up if the stock goes up, or maybe there’s some dividends paid. That’s all building up in your IRA account, right? And you can get it when you’re 59 and a half. Well, in a self-directed IRA, you can go and invest the account into
Real estate. So instead of the stock or the mutual fund being the investment asset, like you own the rental property down the street, you know. and the income on that, the rental income goes in the IRA. When you sell the property, the gain goes in the IRA. And you literally take distribution to 59 and a half. So that’s all growing in the account, tax deferred if you have a traditional account or tax-free if you have a Roth. And so now and you could do private lending, which is what you do. I do a lot of private lending out of my own self-directed account too, where
I’m lending other real estate investors money. They’re paying me 12% interest and two points, annual interest and then points. So I’m getting a 15, 14% annual return, let’s say. But that’s going back into my IRA. It’s not hitting my 1040. I’m not paying taxes on that income. It’s building in a tax advantage retirement account.
Now we have people’s IRAs that invest in startups, in private funds, in crypto, in small businesses, in livestock. I mean, we’ve had a lot of clients’ IRAs invested in private companies that have gone public now, that have invested in professional. We have a client’s IRA that’s invested in a professional Mexican soccer team. Like you can invest in really any asset allowed by law, which the law only restricts like S corporation stock.
Life insurance and collectibles. Those are the only investment assets you can’t own with an IRA. So everything else is fair game. And real estate is like the most common asset because you know it’s more people have become millionaires from real estate than anything else. So that’s definitely very popular. A lot of our accounts are doing real estate. But that’s the nutshell, self-directed IRA.
Thank you. That was fabulous overview. And for somebody who’s listening and they’re like, they’ve got, you know, retirement accounts in conventional, you know, stock market, and they’re like, why would I do this instead? What is your response to that?
you would do it instead if you believed that the investments that you could make, whether it’s a real estate deal, a small business, crypto, a private fund, is better, a better investment than the stock market. So, you know, there’s $50 trillion in US retirement accounts. Like there’s more money there than anywhere to invest. And many Americans, most Americans, have their own little sliver of that $50 trillion. And so
You know, Wall Street has basically said, hey, we control most of the IRA accounts. You can invest in what we sell. And for a lot of people, that’s fine. And even for many Americans, it’s like it’s a it’s good for a portion of their retirement account, maybe even the majority. But for a lot of people, that’s not necessarily the best investment. It’s not always gonna be buy a stock bond or mutual fund, invest in the public stock market. Like that is not always the best answer. So
Well what you can do with a self-directed IRA, what we do at directed IRA is your IRA can invest in the best investment you can find. If that happens to be a small business deal, a real estate deal, then do it with your IRA. And I’ll see too, self-directing isn’t for everybody, you know, but for like you was you mentioned, like your audience of business owners, for business owners and entrepreneurs, real estate investors, it’s probably the account they should be using. They’re more entrepreneurial, they’re willing to go make deals.
Yeah.
They’re willing to go look at things and use their judgment and and they like betting on themselves, so to speak. So I think and so we get a lot of clients that are business owners, entrepreneurs, real estate investors, those are perfect people that love a self-directed IRA.
I know what I hear a lot of people kinda along the lines like you’re saying with entrepreneurs, business owners, is I hear a lot of people saying they don’t want the the potential gain or loss of their investment to be off of what somebody who’s running a you know, let’s say a Fortune five hundred hundred company or something like that.
Yeah.
they want to be able to control their own destiny a little bit more. And they feel like with a self directed IRA
Totally.
they can do that.
Yeah, that’s me. That’s like me to a T what you just described there is like even if I lose, even if I’m it’s like, you know what? That was on me. I I like having control of my destiny and deciding, you know what, if I go make some great decisions and I go find some good deals, you can structure the investment. Right. I mean, the stock market and publicly traded assets are take it or leave it. And there’s a lot, so much of it’s about timing and to and right when you’re getting in and out of the market.
You know, the stock market’s been great recently, but is it at a high? What’s gonna happen the next year? Is this the time to get out? And maybe you should invest in alternatives. You know, there’s always the you know, buy low, sell high. Is this the sell high time? And everybody’s got to make their judgment on that.
Yeah.
But yeah, I think that that is like the that’s the thinking of the self-directed investor is that control of your own destiny, being more attached to your money.
You know, so for so many Americans, they have hundreds of thousands of dollars in an IRA or four or one K. And most of them can’t even tell you what’s in what it’s invested into. Like, I’m, you know, they’re like, I don’t know what’s
not at all.
in my IRA or four one K. I’m like, I know, but what’s it invested into? They’re like, I don’t know, you know, and that’s really sad. Even if they’re not gonna self-direct, they should really be attached to what is that investing in. We spent years, decades, so many Americans.
you know, sacrificing money in the account and then we’re just like, I don’t know what it’s invested in. I mean, it’s insane to me, but
Right.
this truly gives you the connection to the dollars to invest it in the investments that you figure that you determine to be the best.
That makes a lot of sense. Now, if somebody’s thinking about this or gonna maybe get into a self directed d IRA for the first time, what is one of like the top mistakes you see people make when they start self directing the IRA funds so that all of our listeners can avoid that?
the first thing you should know is when we’re talking about real estate in particular, that’s where you see some do see some mistakes is the IRA is not buying real estate for you. It’s not buying real estate for you to use. We’re talking about the IRA’s buying a property because it’s a good investment, because there’s gonna be good cash flow on the rental, or you’re lending money to some other investor because of the interest rate. So there’s there are some rules called prohibited transaction rules you can violate.
If you’re buying the real estate so you can use it, or your kids can stay in it, or you’re lending money to yourself or your own company from your IRA. That actually violates the rules. So when you think of using your IRA to invest, let’s say in real estate, you’re doing that because you believe the real estate asset to be a good investment, not because you’re trying to get some personal benefit of the asset by having use of it or something like that. So I’d steer clear of that. The other thing I would say is.
Get some education on it. I always say self-directing an IRA is not rocket science. It’s more like a board game. But even with the board game, you need to know the rules before you start rolling the dice and playing it and moving pieces around. So it’s it’s not that hard. Once you’ve played it once or twice, you’ve done a couple of investments. The rest are all the same. So it’s just a little different than typing in a ticker symbol on an app on your phone to buy or sell something.
So you just need to learn learn the process. And our team’s here, you know, it’s not like I said, it is not hard. it’s just different than typing in a ticker symbol. You’re gonna find the investment. Your IRA’s gonna own it. There’s some actual paperwork sometime that typically that’s gonna happen. but our team helps with all of that and helps guide you through it to make sure it’s done properly.
you’re mute.
Thank you. we’ve had some background noise here, so I’ve had to mute more than I usually do. so let’s say we’ve got this listener and they are like, my goodness, self-directed IRAs are for me. I want to invest in these alternative assets with part or all of my retirement. They’re sitting on an old 401k or an IRA from a previous job. What’s the first practical step to get that money working in alternative assets through this self-directed IRA?
Yeah, I just book a call with our team. This start from there, it’s free. So you can just go to our website, directed IRA.com, click book a call, set up a an appointment with one of our account reps. And these are all highly experienced people on the team that that do these calls. So they can walk you through like what you’re actually thinking about doing and start guiding you in the right direction. And it might be like the answer might be like, here’s some more education on that. We do a webinar every week. Like there’s like 50 webinars a year that we’re doing the on different
Wow.
topics.
We have two annual events. I, as you mentioned at the beginning, I literally wrote the book on this. Like if you’re the the pilot, the engineer, the doctor that wants to like deep dive something, I wrote a book with a hundred plus citations, you know, on the tax code and everything.
Mm-hmm.
I’m a tax attorney. So like, so whether you want kind of like however you want to learn about it, we basically have resources for you. and we know there’s a little education gap because the the most typical customer we get is someone that’s never done this before.
And so that we know there’s a little bit of a learning curve to be like, all right, I need to understand how this works, how do I do it? So just get a little educated on it first. And this is your retirement dollars. I mean, there’s lot of money there for for many people. So you want to make sure you you learn before you kind of dive in. and then you can make the decision to say once you’ve got a little education, it’s like, all right, this makes sense for me. And if it does, great. If not, nope, you know, no big deal. Just be a little more focused on your retirement dollars now and what you’re doing.
that’s true. I mean the thing is any of our listeners can walk away with this and I at the very least I hope that you are motivated to look into how your retirement dollars are working for you, seeing how that is, making sure it is to your best advantage. And if it’s not or you think there could be improvement, then you can look at transitioning over to a self-directed IRA and putting it into some alternative assets with directed IRA. And Matt has a great team ready to educate and help you determine if that’s the right choice for you.
Yeah, well thank you, Adrian, and thanks for having me. I appreciate you giving me a little commercial there. I I appreciate that. always love talking about directed IRA and thanks for giving me that opportunity.
Yeah, thank you for coming on, Matt. It’s been great to hear about how you built this business. You’ve got a lot of wisdom here for all of the entrepreneurs and business owners in the audience. And then, of course, helping them have their money do the work so that they don’t have to work you know, forever. So thank you so much, Matt. And thank you to our listeners for joining me on another episode of Scale Smart Grow Fast. I’ll see you again next week.
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