Best Way to Pull My Money From Retirement Accounts

[Seth Hochberg]

I'm new to the real estate game, and I'm making a hard pivot in my financial strategy on where to allocate my money. All my life, my financial aspirations have been to max out my retirement accounts, but now I am trying to access my capital to get into real estate. I need help deciding two separate issues. But first here is the financial situation:

I have my money in several "buckets":

1) Cash: 25k
2) Roth IRA: 50k
3) Trad IRA: 45k
4) Roth 401k: 20k
5) Trad 401k: 0

I'm looking to BRRRR in Baltimore and I'd like to get buy in cash, likely supplementing my funds with private lending. My two questions:

1) What's the best way to pull my money out of these accounts? This is my rough plan, but I'm asking for a second pair of eyes. First, reduce retirement contributions to just get the match. Second, I'm going to transfer all of my Traditional IRA money into my Traditional 401k fund. Then I will take two loans: one against my Trad 401k and one against my Roth 401k and continue to pay them back out of my paycheck over 5 years (I like this option because I'm paying myself back). I have a low cost of living, and have done the math that I would be able to do this. I can only take a loan of 50%. If/when I successfully BRRRR, I could pay off that loan, but if not, I would be able to pay off the loan from my paycheck, no problem.

2) Which leads me to my second question. I understand, this is a completely personal decision, but I'm curious what your thoughts on pulling money out of a Roth IRA is? I know I can safely, tax-free withdraw all my contributions (not earnings) in my Roth. Part of me wants to keep that money in, since I've worked hard to grow it to where it is today and let that money stay as my emergency/worst case scenario money. But another part of me realizes how nice it would be to have 35k extra dollars to play with. Curious on your opinions.