Hello, I am posting to see if anyone has had experience with a lender that specializes in loans for Self Directed IRA's?

It may be impossible to find but this could be another option- Not a 100% positive on if the rate <5% now but a loan secured by your IRA (if you have one) is one of the lower rate options out there- Bringing on an equity partner in the deal and giving them a higher percentage of equity at a lower debt cost.

Option 3 is tap some of my retirement pension tax deferred IRA.

I max out my SEP IRA, 401K, and HSA to reduce my tax burden.

Has anyone used a self directed IRA to purchase real estate? 

OR is US based software that can be used without having to use US based elements.I am not sure if the majority of US based systems have US centric aspects built into the software or can be used omitting the non relevant items for Canadians (as most know here, we use RRSPs not 401(k)s, TFSAs not ROth IRAs, partnership income not K1s etc).Thanks!

Dawn and all,Great discussion going on here.I am in the midst of my first property purchase of a buy and hold that I am doing as a 3-way LLC with family members, all using our IRA monies with no borrowing due to not being able to find a non recourse lender for this particular property (age, price, etc)It has become apparent that to grow our real estate business to 'the next level' we will need to find Private Money to leverage our IRA assets.

I took out a HELOC and robbed my Roth IRA.

I was wondering if someone could please shed some light on what the criteria are to show to the IRA that this vacation was indeed for business purposes.

Roth accounts allow you to hedge against higher taxes in the future (more likely than not, in my opinion), and RE investment can help save taxes now, while still providing income now and into the future.RE is part of my retirement plan, but so are IRAs and 401Ks.As a side note, I had a professor during my freshman year of college (a financial planner) who recommended we save for retirement as if Social Security was not going to be there for us.