In general, since I am on the east coast and not in CA, I find real estate a good vehicle for cash flow with modest appreciation.

Land use assessments are vehicles where landowners can request special tax breaks from their municipality for keeping the land in a specific function (i.e. agricultural).

If a branch were to fall, there goes the garage and vehicles in it.

@Cali Skier, That won't work unless you go into a vehicle like non-taxed munis or something like that.  

@Marlon PettisAgree with Ryan Dossey but if you want to be even more precise (until you gain MLS access), a more accurate but more time consuming approach would be to look up the property in Trulia, look at Recently Sold (under Buy) and look at the properties with same rooms/bathrooms sold within the last couple of months within a 0.5mile radius and then do the adjustment from there.

People invest in CD's and other interest baring vehicles all the time for the purpose of getting interest (knowing it'll be taxed as income)The people loaning him money likely have it in a bank making 1% (and being taxed on that meager 1% earnings).  

This allows her to use FHA as a vehicle which investors know as "bridge money," while we bridge her into a conventional loan.

The IRA owns the LLC, and you are the non-owner manager with signing authority.If you put your real estate in such a vehicle and leave other assets of your IRA elsewhere, the real estate liability risk will not impact other IRA holdings.  

There will be a time for it, but not now.I will tell you that there are numerous hard money lenders out there that would love to take your money and put you in a house, but you have to have an exit strategy that may require a long term lending vehicle and if you don't have it, and the house doesn't sell in time, you've added a foreclosure to your credit woes that will take 3-7 years to wash away.  

My plan was to roll this to an SDIRA (self-directed IRA), but I'm not a fan of the fact that my uses for these funds will be more or less limited to non-leveraged vehicles.