Hello and welcome to another episode of Passive Real Estate Investing. I'm your host Marco Santarelli. You know a lot of people, maybe most people don't fully understand the power of a self-directed retirement account and how you can use it to compound your returns, whether it be from promissory notes or real estate or equities, trades or whatnot. The ability to be able to defer or even eliminate your tax impact gives you the ability to take those returns and use them to further your investment activity and compound or accelerate your returns. So my guest today is someone who is incredibly knowledgeable, smart, smart guy, and I've had some great conversations with him. So I've decided to bring him on the show for at least one episode, but it'll probably be two, maybe three, to talk about self-directed retirement accounts like the IRA and specifically as it relates to investing in real estate.

So that is what we're gonna talk to John today about, and we'll talk about the pros and the cons. Now granted there are some cons, but it's mostly pros. There are moer advantages than there are disadvantages. In fact, very few disadvantages of using or investing within one of many self-directed retirement accounts. So with that, let us get to our interview with John Bowens. I hope you enjoy it. Now, there's a lot of good nuggets in here. It is a bit of a longer episode closer to I think 55 minutes, but stick around because there are golden nuggets throughout the entire episode. And enjoy.

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It's my pleasure to welcome today, John Bones to the show. He is the senior Director of education and client Success for Equity Trust. And if you don't know equity trust, they are the largest trust company in the country and I'll let him tell you more about that. But he has been in the self-directed IRA business for 15 years and has trained over 60,000 investors. John is also an active investor himself. He's focused on single family residential, both on the rental side as well as the private money lending side. So with that, John, welcome to the show.

Thank you so much Marco. Thanks for the invitation. Well,

It's great having you on. You're a super smart guy. I've had the pleasure of meeting you not too long ago at our Lake Tahoe Power Room Mastermind event and sat down with you a number of times and got to know you. I just love your depth of knowledge, which is something that I'd like to tap into a little bit today. Why don't we just take a minute here. If you can just quickly tell us a little bit more about yourself and your involvement with Equity Trust to give some context for our audience.

Sure, absolutely Marco. So again, thanks for having me. Really excited to share this information and education with your audience. My background is, is in real estate. I've been in real estate for, for 20 years now, and I stumbled across this concept of being able to use retirement plans to invest in real estate about 15 years ago. And what I was able to do is, is take my background in passion in financial planning and couple it with real estate. Again, I'd been in real estate for 20 years and I was working for a commercial real estate company and we went from, you know, a 95% occupancy rate to about a 60% occupancy rate in the great recession. And I spent my days going from where I was putting new tenants and new properties to locking tenants out and moving those individuals onto their next venture.

And so I, I stumbled across equity trust during that time period and I decided to make a, a little bit of a career adjustment, which I'm very grateful for coming across equity trust company and making that career adjustment. Because what it opened me up to is the ability to take full control of my IRA, 401k or other retirement plans.