Living in Nicaragua inspires you to invest in this developing country. There seems to be an abundance of opportunities to fill the gaps of what doesn’t already exist. Even living mostly paycheck to paycheck, we still have dreams of owning something in Nicaragua. We want to build a home that we can come visit and rent out when we are not here.
After working in the real estate business briefly, I heard there was a loophole that allowed you to “self invest” your 401k or IRA. This intrigued both Kharron & I since we had some money in our retirement funds that didn’t seem to be invested well. Using the money in our IRAs to invest in Nicaraguan real estate sounded too good to be true!
Let me explain: We quickly learned that using a 401k verses an IRA is much more flexible when buying real estate. First off, with a 401k Plan, when you make a real estate investment it does not trigger the Unrelated Debt Financed Income Rules and the Unrelated Business Taxable Income (UBTI or UBIT) tax (IRC 514). However, this exception does not apply to IRAs. In other words, using a “Self-Directed IRA” to make a real estate investment would trigger the UBTI tax. Secondly, traditional IRA’s only allows an individual to contribute $5,500 annually ($6,500 if the person is over 50 years old). A Solo 401k plan allows for contributions up to $59,000 per year. Since we’re planning on building a vacation rental, being able to reinvest the profits back into our retirement fund was important to us.
There is one catch, the typical 401k plan does not usually allow for investing in real estate, so most people form a “Solo 401k Plan”. This is a traditional plan, but covers only one employee (and spouse), and allows you to bypass some regulations. If you have or create a Sole Proprietorship, your business can obtain a Solo 401k Plan. Since a 401k Plan is a trust, the trustee on behalf of the trust can take title to a real estate asset.
Don’t let all this mumbo jumbo fool you, after a lot of research we were still thoroughly confused on how to proceed. Luckily we found the company IRA Financial Group. For a small fee of $1,500, they did all the work for us. They set up the Sole Proprietorship, created The Reid Dynasty 401k Trust, and helped us figure out how to roll our existing retirement funds into a the new Solo 401k Plan. We decided to use Fidelity Financial for our Solo 401k since they have a product called a “Non-Prototype Retirement Account” for Solo 401k’s & I already had my IRA with them so in theory the rollover would be easier.
Everything was set up after a couple months and we started looking at land we wanted to buy.