Northern NJ is not the best place for retirement but it is a great place to raise a family due to the great schools and for those needing easy access to NYC.

Buying a home is the bay area retirement planYes, there are a lot details and differences for everyone's particular situation.

This is my pre-retirement preparation.

The workload has more than doubled with the 3 I have now (and I am technically retired).

So after being laid off a few times in the last 8 years I decided to get back into investing but this time focusing on buy and hold multi family real estate so that I could built wealth that could help me retire my wife who just had a long battle with cancer and survived , but is now back to work, and I want to give her a relaxing life free of all the stress of the world (by the way did I mention she is also in the mortgage lending field) so that explains the urgency to retire her from w-2 work ! 

I generally see literature as such, and cannot tell if having a part time employee removes the chance of solo 401k or if the custodians just don't want to deal with it:"IRS rules prohibit contributions to a solo 401(k) if you have full-time employees, but you can use the plan to cover yourself and your spouse into retirement."

Awesome on the retirement. 

I would love to be able to retire my husband so he can join me on this journey.

I have been investing in trust deeds for over a decade and will continue to do so because I believe this is one of the best ways to invest your retirement funds.

Yes, this was a Rent to Retirement purchase.