You can get 4% in an annuity and 10% in the stock market for example.

He has various annuity's and is happy with his life. 

After we got that one under our belt and rented my brother grabbed more money from his annuity at work and bought another house close by, keep in mind he was the bread winner from his house with one kid in college and twin girls going to college the following year so he was on edge for about 5 months but we fixed the house up and got a cash buy out mortgage against the second house and paid it back and was still making a great profit.

Can the carryback financing be pulled off where the buyer buys an annuity that will fulfill the financing promise to the seller? 

@Greg JungeIf you're going to take the position that your 4 rental properties rise to the level of a 'trade or business' to take advantage of the IRC Sec 199A deduction (QBI deduction), they would not be considered assets 'held for investment', they would be business assets.Investment income for the offset of investment interest expense generally includes interest, dividends, royalties, and annuities. 

I would put 100K into a 10 yr. annuity and use 80K as a down payment for a couple 150k to 200K homes and keep the 20K for emergency funds for your properties.With the rule of 72 you'll probably have 200K at the end of 10 years and you can repeat.  

Is there a way to leverage the funds I have in my 401(k) and annuities to acquire hard money?

I was able to create an annuity that will sustain me for a bit of time.

For example using bonds assigned as additional collateral or structuring a deal to save the seller taxes thereby giving a better price or terms.While writing this I got a call about someone wanting to sell payments that are received from a court order and my suggestion was not to deal with the scum bag but to loan the money to the payee and assign those payments as collateral with the right of offset, that puts the payee and payor on the hook instead of buying the annuity payments.

The ONLY "guaranteed" returns are bank CD's, bank savings accounts, government bonds, and annuities.