Rolling Retirement Fund into Real Estate Fund

[Micah Watson]

My great uncle was a multi-millionaire who took his own life roughly 20 years ago. He left all living family members individual trust funds/retirement accounts conservatively invested in some sort of mutual fund. For me it was always a novelty thing but nothing to hang my hat on, being that I wouldn’t have access until retirement age. After all, who knows if this fund would zero out completely before then or simply fail to yield much of a return. I never bothered to study up on it. 

I found out today that until March, I have a one-time opportunity to access my account to withdraw or roll over into an IRA, and pay some sort of penalty. I need to get my hands on the notice to see what the details are, but I'm curious what you would do. I believe my account has somewhere just shy of 100k. My initial thought is that I would pay less in penalties if I rolled it into a self-directed IRA and I could use that IRA to invest in real-estate.

I'd love to hear the pros and cons on this. For instance, would it be virtually impossible to use leverage in an IRA? Or could it be done if the loans were non-recourse? I don't want to trade a low performer for an average performer, if I could instead leverage and get 20%+ through creative investing.