Everything must be kept at arm's length and you may not benefit in any personal way until such time as you start taking distributions from the IRA or 401k in retirement.If you utilize your Solo 401k in a manner where you think of yourself as a fund manager deploying the capital to it's highest and best use, and not as "joe landlord" using the retirement capital to fund "your" real estate deals, then you will be just fine.Such a plan provides the opportunity to put that retirement capital to work in real estate, invest in what you know, and hopefully achieve better results with that retirement savings than if you left if in the good hands of the folks on Wall Street.Take the time to research and learn about the process of using a self directed IRA or 401k.  

I've purchased and renovated three properties in the last 10 months with a deployment in the middle. 

I'm active duty Air Force deployed to Afghanistan.

Perhaps this place isn't doing anything for your long term goals and you can deploy your resources better doing something else. 

Many have lots of money to deploy, including REIT's, Pension Funds and Sovereign investment vehicles from around the world, UNHW family offices, etc..

When the soldiers are deployed (they're coming back now) the demand is way down when they're home it's way up.

During the fours years I was in I experienced deployments, TDYs, training, etc at a pace I was not ready to experience for the next 16 years. 2) Having moved around I knew exactly where I wanted to end up, and that was in Kentucky.

These investors would rather deploy capital into bad investments than to have the capital sitting on the sidelines -- this allows them to push off the problems of dealing with irate shareholders to tomorrow instead of today.So, we are able to wholesale non-rehabbed properties at essentially ARV to investors planning to hold as rentals.

There's just no way to maintain any family being gone on a 10 month deployment, come back for a few months, and be gone for another 10 months.

Coupled with the custodian fees, the returns I could generate wouldn't be worth the headache.Prosper offers to pay all custodian fees if I invest it there, and because it takes little work, along with the ability to get descent returns, I decided to invest there.See here for lender return distribution: http://www.ericscc.com/stats/lender-return-distributionAs far as getting around usury laws, I'm not qualified to really have an opinion, but you can read about it here: http://www.prosper.com/legal/compliance/I completely agree that I can get less risky investments in real estate or even doing hard money, however, with the low amount of money that is in my IRA, its simply not worth my while to spend too much time or effort trying to deploy $5K.In a few years, after some more contributions, I may have a different attitude about it though.