All it takes is one bad tenant...So, there is a little piece of my story all wrapped up in a ball with a bow for you fellow investment travelers!

(this makes sense, a 4.625 yield compounded annually over 14 years on a $300 monthly deposit generates me about $20,300 of interest, I checked with a calculator like this one) Returns on my Roth IRA are (maybe) 7% per year.

There are a few you can choose from.Thanks Dawn, I will have another look but everything I see online is just a regular amortization schedule and nothing to quickly look at the savings with compounding effect.

Real estate is IMO is about compounding your revenue.

By doing so I was able to eliminate the compound interest of a traditional mortgage and drastically pay down the loan in just a few short years.

Walking into the basement of a home I bought at foreclosure auction and seeing mold on the OSB lined walls and on the ceiling tiles - my property manager wouldn't even walk into the basement.Then after having the mold abated...getting a call from the property manager telling me about the basement walls bowing inward because of hydrostatic pressure that we didn't see because of the wall framing and OSB walls covering it...and talking to a contractor that estimated $15k in repairs (even though he outright stated his company didn't do that sort of thing)...then having a wall outlet issue in the kitchen upstairs, and having an electrician tell me he needed to re-wire the whole basement because the copper wire had been cut up.Mold Abatement was $7,900Hydrostatic cracks were sealed and painted over (no issues at all)Re-wiring the basement $4,000Much more reasonable than I anticipated.  

If, on the other hand, you could invest the plan directly into something that earns 10-12% (easy), then by taking the loan you are giving up a lot of tax-deferred compounding over time.

I get the impression that they are comparing a 12% return that isn't compounded, with an 8% or so return that is compounded and thinking they are a lot better off.If you bought a $100K rental property, put 20% down, and generated a 20% cash-on-cash return with that property for 10 years, you would end up with about $60K total ($4,000 x 10 years, plus initial investment). 

I'm a strong believer in compound interest, and that's a full decade of compound interest.

If you are anything like me, it is hard to want to think long term when you are your age, but the law of compound interest tells us you should be.