My friends, get ready to learn something about a huge limit on your IRA that is TOTALLY OPPOSITE what you’ve been told by everybody else.  This is a big, big deal and a huge risk factor for your self-directed IRA.  I’m Bryan Ellis.  I’ve got the details for you now in Episode 228.   Hello, SDI Nation!  Welcome to the podcast of record for savvy self-directed investors like you, where we help you take control of your investments and your legacy, and today, I’ll do that by helping you to protect your self-directed IRA in the face of transactions that appear totally kosher, but could be like a nuclear detonation in your retirement savings. Let’s start the show with a bribe.  Hehehehe  Here goes: I want you to SUBSCRIBE to this show on iTunes.  That tells the iTunes people that we’re producing good stuff, and in turn they send us more listeners.  So here’s my proposal:  If I teach you something today you didn’t know before, which is DIRECTLY RELEVANT TO THE SAFETY OF YOUR INVESTMENTS either now or in the future, then will you SUBSCRIBE to this show for free when we’re done with this show in a few minutes?  That’s all I ask.  Deal?  Thanks so much! Awesome, let’s get to it.  This episode was spurred by an article I saw over at MarketWatch, where a debate broke out concerning whether a self-directed IRA can buy assets from or sell them to a COUSIN of the IRA owner.  The broadly accepted advice on this – spelled out on the IRS website – is that the only family members expressly disqualified are ancestors – like parents and grandparents – along with your descendants and their spouses.  This seems to indicate that other family members – like siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins, etc. are not disqualified and therefore are fair game as counterparties for your self-directed IRA. So is it kosher for your IRA to do business with a cousin, or other non-lineal family members?  Folks, that’s the WRONG QUESTION entirely, and looking at it that way can DESTROY your IRA.  Let’s look at that right after I tell you how to get 0% interest lines of credit of $50,000 to $250,000 by working with my friends at Fund & Grow.  A quick story – I was recently at the Georgia Real Estate Investors Association meeting, and another member came up to me and said “it works!”  I was really happy to hear this, but I didn’t know this person or what they were talking about… and that’s when they told me they’d listened in to the webinar I did with Fund & Grow… and as a result, this local investor was able to achieve an eye-popping amount of zero-interest credit!  It was really cool because they just approached me randomly… I wasn’t a speaker at that meeting or anything of the sort.  But this guy and his wife sought me out specifically to tell me about their GREAT results of getting 0% interest funding through my friends Ari & Mike at Fund & Grow.   Folks, if you need funding for any of your deals, do yourself a favor and reach out to them.  You can find them at SDIRadio.com/credit, and when you go there, you’ll learn how to have an extraordinary competitive advantage.  I believe in them.  Check them out right now at SDIRadio.com/credit. So… can your IRA do business with a cousin or aunt or uncle?  Or is that even the right question?  Well, to be blunt, it’s absolutely the WRONG question. Here’s the thing:  Yes, the IRS does stipulate a limited set of family members who are expressly disqualified from doing business with you through your IRA.  So, for example, if your parents or grandparents or even children owned a piece of real estate, and you wanted to buy it into your IRA, you can’t do it.  That’s prohibited very clearly.  But as far as family is concerned, the answer changes if the owner of the property isn’t your direct ancestors or descendants, but rather a sibling or cousin.  Those, at first glance, seem to be ok… and that’s the broadly accepted opinion. Alas, there’s more… FAR MORE… than meets the eye, and it’s all legally uncharted waters.  And I’m not giving leg