Welcome to another information-packed episode of the IRA Cafe podcast! In this episode, host Kyle Moody, Business Development Manager at American IRA, welcomes Benjamin Steff (Ben Stef) from Nexa Mortgage for a conversation that explores the crossroads between creative lending and creative investing specifically when it comes to using self-directed IRAs. Ben shares his journey from growing up in a large Romanian immigrant family immersed in construction to launching his own mortgage business in Chicago, highlighting how his upbringing shaped his resilient, entrepreneurial mindset. Together, Kyle and Ben dive into the nuts and bolts of leveraging retirement accounts for real estate investments, demystifying products like DSCR loans and addressing the possibilities and challenges of using non-recourse loans within self-directed IRAs. The discussion provides valuable real-world scenarios, tips for scaling up your investment portfolio, and expert advice on managing risk and navigating the noisy landscape of economic news and technological change. Whether you’re a seasoned real estate investor or just starting to look beyond traditional assets within your retirement accounts, this episode will give you practical insights and actionable strategies.

Key takeaways:

1. Entrepreneurial Roots and Perspective: Ben’s upbringing in a hardworking immigrant family instilled a no-handouts, entrepreneurial mindset that drives his approach to creative lending and business-building, offering a unique advantage to his clients 06:45.
2. DSCR Loans Explained: Debt Service Coverage Ratio (DSCR) loans allow investors to qualify for rental property financing based on the property's income not the borrower's personal income enabling greater scalability in real estate investing 10:30.
3. Leveraging in Self-Directed IRAs: While leveraging within a self-directed retirement account is possible, only non-recourse loans are allowed, and lenders usually require personal guarantees posing unique challenges when the IRA is the borrower 16:04.
4. Managing Risk and Overleveraging: Investors should be cautious about overextending themselves, always assessing cash flow, keeping reserves, and using lines of credit as emergency funds to safeguard against unforeseen property issues or market shifts 22:20.
5. Tuning Out the Noise for Strategic Growth: Ben emphasizes focusing on local expertise and trusted professionals over sensational media headlines or generic AI advice, encouraging investors to carve out their own path by leaning on their unique advantages and maintaining a consistent, niche-driven strategy 27:42.

If you want to learn how to creatively grow your passive income and confidently leverage your self-directed IRA in today’s ever-changing market, don’t miss this thoughtful and practical episode of the IRA Cafe!

What happens when creative lending meets creative investing with your self-directed retirement account? Come on into the IRA Cafe as we sit down with Ben Stef from Nexa Mortgage. Hi again, everyone, and welcome inside the IRA Cafe powered by American IRA. I'm your host, Kyle Moody, in the business development office here at American IRA, and we're so glad that you could spend some time with us today to get some great information from a wonderful guest. that we were excited to bring on. So wherever and whenever you are getting your podcast, we're glad that you could spend a few minutes with us here. We're going to make sure that that time with us is really packed full of things that you might want to know when it comes to doing your next investment, specifically with your self-directed IRA. And if you've already got a self-directed IRA with American IRA, we want to thank you for your continued support. and your business.

It always means a lot to us, and we really appreciate that. If you are someone who are looking to get started with your very first self-directed retirement account, or if you're looking to move an account over to American IRA, we would be more than happy to have you come over. And I specifically want to make sure that you have my direct phone number and my email address where you can reach me and you can ask me any questions that you need to know about how to really grow your investment objectives, feel free to take a look at our website at www.americanira.com. And there you're going to see all the different self-directed retirement account vehicles that you can have and all the different type of asset classes that you can invest with those retirement accounts. Again, anything specific you'd like to speak about with me, go through any of your scenarios, I'm never too busy to take your call or your referrals. And you can reach me directly at 828-412-8123. And if you'd like to email me instead, please feel free to do that. Bullet out some things and we'll schedule a time to get together.

And that's kyle@americanira, K-Y-L-E at American IRA. I look forward to, uh, having some conversations with you going forward. Well, without further ado, let's go ahead and bring in our guest into the cafe today, Benjamin Stef, who also goes by Ben, and he's with Nexa And if you haven't had the chance to see it yet, Ben also did a webinar with us and presented just some fantastic information out there. So if you do want to be able to see the rebroadcast of that, make sure you check it out on our YouTube channel at americanira.com. So, and also at American IRA LLC, and you can subscribe on that. Well, Ben, welcome into the cafe. Thanks so much for taking some time out to spend with us today.

Yeah, Kyle, thanks for having me. Appreciate it.

Absolutely. So listen, you know, one thing that we didn't get to do on the webinar presentation that you did that I always like to do here so that our guests can get a good feel who they're listening to and everything, if you wouldn't mind, just tell us a little bit about your background and, you know, how it brought you to what you're doing now in your profession.

Yeah, so I started in, uh, construction actually. My dad is a GC, so we— he came from Eastern Europe, grew up with an immigrant family, and so I got to see 2 sides of the same coin. And so we grew up doing construction. I realized I'm not a fan of working and dying in the heat and in the cold, not dying physically, like actually dying, but you get what I'm saying. It's hard work. And so growing up, I would always see the guys in suits or people show up that own the real estate, and I've always was wondering, what are those guys doing? Because they're making all the money, but they're not here working on the building, right? Or whatever. And so that slowly but surely through college and just many different odd jobs, I finally landed like my first career just being in a big mortgage corporation, working in one of their big offices handling refinances. And that's how I sort of built my business is just starting at that point where We were just handling that.

And then slowly but surely, eventually just started my own like P&L, my own business from that. And now we're just running our own lending shop. So yeah, transition, been doing it for 6 years now. And I love helping investors. I love creatively thinking outside the box because people have, there's a lot of people that don't think outside the box that just kind of like a McDonald's drive-through, you know, they just take your order and they give you the food, you know, which is fine, but I think sometimes it helps to have someone, Kyle, and I'm sure you could attest to this, that someone that like thinks big picture, that also understands where you're going and how to help you get there and not just like shoving things down your throat of like, oh, this is what you need, this is what you should do. I don't care about the rest. And so that was kind of how we did our construction business and that's how, you know, I applied to lending. So yeah, it's pretty much where I came from.

And my degree's in business. Honestly, I didn't really need it. I finished it out of spite and out of pride because I don't like starting things and not finishing. So. That's where I am now.

So, where are you located now?

Yeah, so we're located in Chicago, Illinois.

Okay, fantastic. That's a town I've always wanted to get up to. I haven't been there yet. Now, you've mentioned being born to an immigrant family. Where did family come from in a Chicago where Where they landed or what's some of the background on that?

Yeah, so born in Romania. Romania's by Hungary, Moldova, and then they came here in the States in the late '80s, early '90s. And so I was born here, they were born there. And so yeah, that's how it started. So we've always been in Chicago.

Yeah.

I've heard this a lot, children of immigrants, and especially what they— here you are, you've built your own company. Do you think that really your— how much did being the son of immigrants and maybe what they went through before they moved really played a role into that? What did your parents do for profession?

Yeah, massive, massive role. Like, because my dad was a GC and my mom just helped my dad run the business, that was sort of like, it was kind of like a family business and all my aunts and uncles. So my dad, my dad has 9 siblings, so it's a big family, which is very common in Romania. You have a lot of kids, unlike now we have like 1 or 2 kids per family, right? So back then everybody had like 6, 10, 15 kids. And so what's funny is all of them are entrepreneurs, I think with the exception of one or two, but like most, like all of them run their own business. And so that was just the family dynamic growing up. And so yeah, I grew up with no handouts. You eat what you kill, you have to get after it.

Nobody's going to help you, kind of like you're on your own, you have to figure it out. And like, we're in a country where it's probably one of the easiest countries to be able to do that. I know a lot of people complain about politics, about taxes, about this and that, but man, we have no idea how good we have it here. You know, like we have, we have absolutely no idea how easy it is and how good we have it here versus any other country. And that's, yeah. So, and we, and I've, I just came back from Romania literally like 3 weeks ago. So like it's real, you know?

Well, you know, and that's gonna be good to really tap into. So for those of you listening, stick around for one of the things I wanna talk about near the end of the show here. Well, you specialize in what some people might call creative lending, okay? And so we wanna be able to take a look at that and how it might meld with folks that are doing self-direction because that really kind of coincides to how American IRA provides a product for someone to creatively invest, you know, to grow their passive income. It's outside the stock market, so they're investing in the non-traditional assets. And that, of course, is going to be real estate, private lending themselves out of their retirement account, you know, getting into private equities, doing precious metals. Heck, even if it's, you know, oil and gas rights, for oil wells out in Texas. But specifically, let's look at the real estate angle because really, you know, self-directed IRAs obviously allow people to purchase real estate inside of that retirement account. But, you know, sometimes they might not be able to fund that 100% in cash.

So they're starting to look at Well, does that mean I can't use the account at all? You know, can I leverage? What are ways that I can invest in, say, real estate if I can't fund this thing 100% from my account? And this is really where, you know, we thought, well, this is going to be some great information to share with folks here as opposed to, and also how you did it in the webinar that you did with us. So, Let's get into the leveraging part, you know, for a while here. So one of the things that you, you know, have talked about with us before that you have on your site, Ben, is DSCR loans. All right. Now I hear that in all of my different lunch and learns that I'm in, all the different groups I'm part of, but someone's gonna be listening and they never wanna feel like They just, they don't know what's going on. They might be scared to ask. Go ahead and take us through what is it and how does it commonly work?

Yep. So here's the simplest explanation ever for DSCR loans. Basically, it's a rental property loan where it only hinges on the rental income from the property to prove that the loan could be repaid. And so traditionally people have to show their income, right? But DSCR loans show the property's income, so it doesn't not concern itself with your personal income and your personal debt. You could have 20 car payments, you could be jobless, you could literally have no income on paper. But if you have the down payment, you have the credit score, you can go and buy as many rental properties as you want. Some people ask me, Ben, how high can I get approved for? I'm like, well, it depends. You know, how much can you put down? Can you, you know, 20% down is the minimum.

So if you have $500,000 in the bank, right? you could purchase then up to whatever the math is, $1.5 million or $2 million, right? And so as long as whatever 20% down is, that's how high you can go. And of course you have to have reserves, which just means money set aside that you can cover the mortgage payments. But in short, DSCR loans just let you buy rental properties at scale, right? At scale, meaning once you have multiple mortgages to your name, the problem becomes that you'd no longer qualify on paper because you're not showing enough income. So DSCR loans say we're not going to look at any of that and you can buy as many as you want as long as you have those key factors.

So this sounds like something that actually might be right up the alley of someone who is investing in real estate with their self-directed retirement account. Am I, am I right on that?

Mm-hmm. Yeah. So they, they could use the funds from their IRA, whatever, you know, depends on how they have it structured. Because I know with IRAs, I think you can choose between many different like asset vehicles to invest in. But yeah, you could use that to bridge, you could use DSCR loans to bridge the gap if you cannot pay cash for a property. I mean, that's what the rich are doing. The rich, even I have so many clients that could pay cash for a lot of things, but they don't. They leverage loans even though that they don't need to because they could, instead of you paying cash and buying, let's say 2 properties a year, guys that leverage could buy 10 properties a year.

Because thinking, you know, having $1 million or $500,000 in the bank, you can now go buy a bunch of $100K or $200K properties 20% down instead of paying cash for all of them and only buying a lesser amount.

Yeah.

Okay, great. Let me ask you this. Is it different than when using the SCRs again, and we're starting to specify here using self-directed retirement accounts, Is it different than what someone might realize when purchasing outside of the self-directed IRA? In other words, what are the differences, if any, if someone is making this investment, doing the DSCR loan outside of a retirement account and the exact same property, the exact same person, but now they're doing it with self-directed funds? Anything that's different about that?

So not much of a difference when it comes to DSCR. Depends if we're talking residential or commercial, and I'll try to keep it simple, Kyle. So for commercial properties, guys, like we're looking at hotels, strip malls, 20-unit buildings, non-recourse loans are more popular and more available for commercial properties, but they come at a cost because non-recourse is generally riskier because you're not personally guaranteeing the loan. In real estate, when it comes to real estate and loans in general, they like it when you are a personal guarantor on the loan. Meaning that yes, even if you're buying through an entity, even though you're buying through a vehicle, someone still has to be held responsible for the loan even though the property's being held as collateral. So what I'm saying is for DSCR loans, especially for residential, meaning 1 to 4 unit properties, so anything under, anything 4 or under, 4 units or under, You have to have someone that's personally liable for the loan. You can still close in an entity, you can close an LLC, you can close in an S corp, right? You have layers of protection if you want, but someone still has to have their credit, basically putting up their credit report, their credit scores on the line for that loan. So when you pull your credit, you'll still have that mortgage to your name.

Because a lot of people ask me, well, Ben, Could I have it not report to credit? Here's the thing, okay? And a lot of lenders won't tell you this. You, like, at the time of closing, we could set up a loan where it doesn't report to your personal credit. The problem is, you know how mortgages get sold? Everybody who has— who's had a mortgage can see this, where sometimes it changes. You know, you're making payments to Chase, now you're making payments to Rocket or Mr. Cooper, right? The thing is, when that happens, sometimes they will personally report Like they will report that loan to credit because it's out of our hands. So the problem is at time of funding, we can set up to where it doesn't show up on your personal credit report, but after a while it still could. So we can't guarantee that it won't. And so this is something that I'm seeing now come up a lot.

A lot of people are asking me that. So that's why I'm throwing it out there because I know there might be some people that are curious about it. But at the end of the day, for the residential loans, they still need to Like we, that's why we look at credit scores, right? We need to see who's behind the LLC or the entity, like whoever owns it, like they have to personally guarantee that loan. I hope that makes sense.

Well, it did, but it makes me want to ask a clarifying question here. So when someone is using a self-directed retirement account and if they need to leverage, the only type of loan they can use is a non-recourse loan. So therefore the parameters are very tight, very stringent on this. So are you telling me that they would, someone would still want to have a personal guarantee if someone's using a self-directed retirement account? Because at that point, you know, the borrower can't be the guarantor because the borrower isn't the individual, it's the retirement account itself. So how does, how would that work? Non- Yeah.

So in general, they're still going to want that borrower personally guaranteeing the loan. Now, as far as closing in a self-directed IRA, I don't know what the entity structure of that looks like and how that would be set up because generally speaking, we have a lot of, like, this is just from my experience, guys will liquidate And use that for the down payment, they won't necessarily close inside the IRA. And I think just because lenders don't, generally speaking, allow that for residential, they do want someone to be a personal guarantee. So you can't close under an entity that is like this magical, not magical, but this sort of mysterious entity that we don't know who owns it. Right? Or like we need to have something behind that entity that says, yeah, I'm the owner, I'm the one that's going to pay back this loan. It's not just like we just give a loan to the— it's not like a business loan per se where it's like, yeah, we're lending to the business and then the business has to pay us back. I mean, that's probably a bad example, but the point I'm making is that there's— it's not like a separate credit system like with business. It's still going to have your personal for the residential loans.

Yeah.

So let me ask you this then. If one of the things that you have been able to show folks is how to use or how to receive the creative lending when using a self-directed retirement account, if it's possible that somebody still needs the person guaranteeing something which isn't allowed, Uh, you know, when using the self-directed IRA, even if it's a portion thereof, then, then talk about the creative lending, uh, type of platforms that you might have that someone is able to receive when straight out using their self-directed IRA and, and, and that's it.

So an alternative option is paying cash for it, but then taking cash out right away back after you close. So we call that delayed financing. So delayed financing is when you pay cash for a property, but then within 6 months get cash back and pay yourself from the equity of that property. So we have creative financing programs built just for that, for people that, hey, I'm going to buy this property, but I know I'm going to get it back right away. There's different reasons why people do that. It serves different purposes. So you're not rehabbing or flipping the property, right? You're going to buy it, but then you're just going to pay yourself back right away. And so you could do it, you could do it that way as well.

Gotcha. Gotcha. Tell me this about the different asset platforms. So, you know, we talked about residential there. You brought up commercial. Does this mean that your lending really knows no bounds? I mean, is this single-family, multifamily as well? Talk to us about those asset classes.

Yeah, so we, we right now, especially being in the Chicago market, there's a lot of multifamily properties that we deal with. So we are, I specialize in a lot of 2 to 4 unit properties and then 5 to like, I would say 5 to 30 unit properties, but whether it's 30 units or 50, it's the same. So we call, you know, some people call it multi-unit, some people call it multifamily. You know, I look at multifamily as 2 to 4 units. I look at multi-units as, you know, 5 unit plus, doesn't matter. Anyway, the point I'm making is that those loans are different, entirely different when you start stepping into the commercial territory. And there's a lot more freedom and they're a lot more lax on, okay, using self-directed IRAs. If you want to close in that, there's a lot more non-recourse loans available instead of personally guaranteeing the loan.

However, even commercial lenders, they like people guaranteeing the loans. They like having someone to call if you don't make your payments. There's less risk on their books and on paper. So that's why you get a better interest rate. you get better terms when you are saying, yes, I'm going to personally guarantee this loan, right? Instead of having a non-recourse and hiding behind it. So that's just the way lending is set up now, and that's just what we've been seeing, especially with the loans in the commercial space.

Yeah.

Gotcha. How about land or fix and flips?

Yeah, so fix and flips, generally speaking, the ones that we've been doing, we haven't had a lot of people, I mean, I haven't had any people leveraging the self-directed IRAs with that. They just had cash for the, you know, they'll just use their own funds and they're usually personally liable for the loan. They'll close in an entity like a limited liability corporation company or S corp. So we need guys to cover the down payment, whether it be the 20%, 10% down to bridge the gap between the fix and flip loan and obviously the purchase price. So in my experience, like generally they'll still close in the LLC, they will still use the funds from whatever accounts that they have. But we haven't closed for fix and flips any like self-directed IRA methods, if that makes sense.

Gotcha.

You had touched on risks earlier. So whether it's something that someone needs to know upfront or something they consider over time, what are some of the risks that people would want to Just contemplate, think about as they're moving forward?

Yeah, if you're getting a loan, whether it's against yourself borrowing against, you know, 401 with IRAs or even just like someone like me, we're always looking at what's the return on investment, right? And I know it's like, okay, this is nothing revolutionary, but I think boring is what makes money. So leverage is powerful, but over-leverage And like extending yourself will create a cash flow issue where you have now too many responsibilities and not enough income coming in. And so one of the things that I talk about with my investors is like, let's make sure we're not overborrowing. Just because you can doesn't mean you should. What's nice about all these loans is that they don't look at personal income, they look at the income from the property. But if something happens with the income of the property, There is that risk of do you have reserves? Do you have a cushion in case something happens? Tenant leaves for whatever reason. You have an eviction, tornado, hurricane. I don't know.

There's things like that that we look at, whether you're getting a line of credit on a rental or they're using a DSCR loan is, hey, do you have— even for me, I like lines of credit as, as an emergency fund, right? Because lines of credit you don't have to make payments on if you have a zero balance. So a lot of my investors will open these lines of credit and use that as an emergency fund. So I have one client client right now that has $1 million combined from all the HELOCs at zero balance basically. So he could draw up to $1 million at any moment's notice, and that's his emergency fund. On top of that, he has cash, right? So he's very well protected in case something happens and he needs to draw on that money, right? And sometimes you could use the money to pay for the debt, but that's the biggest thing is, are you overleveraging yourself, right? And what's the return on investment of this debt payment that I'm going to get? So we have this client closing on a 4-unit. His mortgage payment was $5,000 a month, but the rental income came back at like $4,000 a month. So we knew, hey, we're going to be negative. Be aware you're losing $1,000 a month.

But he was going to force appreciate the property, meaning he was going to rehab it, increase the value, and he was going to raise rents. And he's getting 5% appreciation every year. And what is that on a it was like the building was like $750,000 in value. You're looking at a $37,000 increase every year and it goes up from that, right? And that's 5%. That's very conservative. So he knows, he's like, I'm making my money back. Yes, I'm losing $1,000 a month short term, but once I handle all the CapEx and all the value adds, I'm going to increase rent. So anyway, long-winded answer, but that's what we look at.

Don't over-leverage. And then what's the return here? Is it worth it? Or just take the money and put it into a, I don't know, high dividend paying stock. Or, you know, like you can just put into a stock if that's the case. Like it doesn't have to be real estate, you know? But anyway, yeah.

This borrower that you were talking about, is that somebody up there in the Chicagoland area? Do you kind of focus just regional or what markets do you really tend to target? Or, I mean, do you have clients from just, you know, from coast to coast?

Yeah, so we're all over, Kyle. Like, we're all over in most states with the exception of like some of the weird ones like Alaska and maybe Hawaii. But we do. So the main states are California, Texas, Florida, Georgia, Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina, New Jersey, Illinois, obviously Ohio, Wisconsin, Indiana, Just to, just to off the top of my head, those are the predominant states where we're seeing a lot of investing activity. Minnesota's another one. I'm not seeing a lot of in Idaho or in Arkansas, right? Those are states where I think, I'm not saying it's not a good place to invest, it's just where most of our clients are coming from. Those are the states. But yeah, we can pretty much do like most of the 50 or almost all of the 50 states.

Gotcha.

So one thing that you had mentioned earlier is that there's stuff out there, politics and this and that, but if you drill down, really what I call it is there's always lots of noise. All right? So I've got a good friend who mentioned something interesting in a meeting that we had recently where he says, we're not going to look at what all's going on in just the country or what's going on with all the noise. Don't pay attention to the news because there's nothing ever good there. We're going to kind of create our own economy, our household economy, and move from there, invest from there, spend from there, save from there. So with all the noise that's out there, higher Fed rates, inflation, all the things, Right? How do you keep your clients, you know, I mean, is there a pivot that you've had to make? And we're asking this, you know, in all the different groups that I'm in. And so I'm presenting this to you. Is there something that you are speaking to your clients about or any pivots that you have professionally have had to make to really keep your clients, you know, keeping their eyes on the objective and moving forward?

Great question. What is the main goal of these media outlets? Attention, right? They have to choose the most polarizing topics and use copywriting that grabs attention, especially negative attention, because fear sells. And they know this, right? Obviously, there's not as much attention and viewership to firefighter saves cat from tree. Right? What's better is, oh my gosh, housing market is crashing. We're at negative 20%. Okay? And I see this all the time. I see this constantly where there's always bad news and it's like you're not going to get anything done looking at the news. It is probably one of the most unproductive, in my opinion, as an investor thinking, in business terms, one of the most unproductive things you could do because it does not help you at all accomplish the goals that you're trying to accomplish.

So what we do, especially with AI now, which makes it worse, by the way, if you want to talk about noise, now there's AI, which is like a personal tutor that helps you do anything. Hey, customize a meal plan. Give me a workout plan. I want to take my wife out to dinner. Give me 10 places. Like, it's great for a lot of things. I use it a lot. The problem is AI doesn't know details about very specific proprietary loan products and financial products.

So it doesn't give the best advice there. And so that's why I personally lean on the experts of like, I don't care what AI is saying, what the internet and Google is saying and what the news is saying. Let me go ask the guy that is local to my market that specifically is an expert in Cleveland, Ohio, and has been doing real estate there for over 20 years. Like that guy knows more. What is AI going to tell you? Job employment is up 15% and we're experiencing rental growth and da, da, da. It's like, it's not going to tell you, in my opinion, it's not, it's going to give you macro observations. And so I think my biggest thing is not listening to the noise, but then listening to very key people that you trust on, hey, what is your footprint on what's going on at a macro or micro level? And, you know, go from there. I think that is much more effective.

I think AI can still help, I think AI can still give information. I think though that you need to vet it through the people that you trust and your professional team, right? Like Kyle, you're going to be my— you're on my professional team, right? I have Kyle, I have my contractor, I have my plumber. Like I might go to AI and say like, why is my P-trap causing issues? Like I have my P-trap in my vanity. What's going on here with the plumbing, with the PVC? And I can take a picture and I can ask it. Or I can FaceTime my guy and you'll tell me in 30 seconds, yeah, this is what you need to do, right?

Right.

Like, my point, the point that I'm making is that sometimes we hide behind too much of the news and the technology, and that I think there's still value in the human. Like, I'm just going to call Kyle. Let me just call him and he'll, like, we'll get this straightened out in 10 minutes as opposed to me doing research for 3 hours. Because people do that all the time. Last thing, I'm talking a lot, I know. I cannot tell you how many investors that book calls with me that will come to me and be like, Ben, I went to Gemini, ChatGPT, Claude, whatever their medium of choice is for AI. And they're like, yeah, you know, AI told me this, this, and this. Like, is that true? And I'm like, no, because it depends on this, it depends on that.

It's not addressing XYZ. And so a lot of the results that you're getting, it's not actually true because I'm the one issuing the money and giving you the loans. there's a lot of key points that it doesn't know on the backend when it comes to underwriting anyway. So yeah, just sometimes just talking to an expert, and I'm not just saying this to like, hey guys, like come talk to me and like book a call. And I'm not trying to sell, like I'm just making like, I still believe in the old school, like call up the guy and just ask him and you might be better off.

Well, I guess that, you know, kind of leads into one of the things that, you know, what do you see as the silver lining for investors moving forward? In letting them know, hey, look, you want to make the investment, do it, and here's how you're going to be able to do it. I'll let you have the signing off there and tell folks what they can look forward to.

I would say the main thing is keep the main thing the main thing, right? So there's a lot of guys out there that want to do fix and flips and want to do condos and want to do multifamily. And I think that's your biggest Disadvantage is not picking a niche when it comes to real estate investing and focusing on that niche. Get really, really good at understanding Oklahoma City, Dallas, whatever your area is. That's number one. Number two, what's your unique advantage? I have a guy that owns a construction company. That's his unique advantage. He has a construction crew, subcontractors. He's ready to go.

His problem is finding the deals. Okay? So he needs to outsource and have a team that helps him find the deals, right? I got guys that are realtors. They're great at finding deals, but They are atrocious at construction. So what do they need to do? Okay, that's their— they can play off of that. So for you, you have to figure out, okay, engineer, you're really, really good at math and spreadsheets and analyzing. The problem is though, your downside is you can overanalyze this deal to death and not make any moves, right? Or get anywhere. And so you need to also take action and then have a team that's ready to take action with you. So the point that I'm making is that focus on a niche, And establish a defensive line so you can play offense.

And what is your unique advantage and run off of that? And that's more for the newer investors. For the older investors that are very experienced, just, yeah, lines of credit, man. That's the way to go right now. If you guys can open up multiple lines of credit, that's your emergency fund. That's your money that you're not paying interest on, that when you need to find a deal, you can move on it, tap into that line of credit instead of doing a cash-out refinance. That is the best thing right now as an investor you can take advantage of if you don't want to use your own cash.

Gotcha. Gotcha. Well, listen, Ben, from— Ben Stef from Nexa Mortgage, we're so glad that you could take some time out from your busy day today and just spread some, spread some knowledge that it might actually spread some wealth with, with some folks and hopefully everyone that tuned in today or wherever and whenever. you're listening to your podcast, that you did get something from this. As you know, we always like being able to bring you the best information so that when you are moving forward, especially when using your self-directed retirement account with American IRA, that you have all the information you need to make those sound judgment calls. If you don't have that self-directed IRA yet and you are looking to get started, remember you can find us at www.americanira.com. And there you will find my information, and I'll go ahead and give it to you here. You can call me directly, 828-412-8123, or you can email me directly at [email protected].

I'm never too busy for any of your calls, any of your referrals, and I do look forward to carving out some time and speaking with you to find out how we can get you on the road to meet your investment objectives. Well, that's going to do it for this episode of the IRA Cafe powered by American IRA. Again, I'm Kyle Moody, part of the business development team here, and for everyone that works at American IRA, we'll see you next week.

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