Show Your Retirement Portfolio Some Love this Year

Published on February 11, 2021

Whether you’ll be staring adoringly into your partner’s eyes on Valentine’s Day or celebrating with a Galentine’s/Malentine’s Day get-together with friends, February is the month of love and friendship—and your retirement plan also deserves some special attention.

The first way to give your retirement plan a loving boost is to open a self-directed IRA. Why a self-directed plan? Two words: alternative assets. And those non-publicly traded, alternative assets provide you with many ways to diversify your retirement portfolio with an array of investments you may already be “engaged” with outside of a retirement plan. In most IRAs held with a brokerage, those alternative investment options are not always available to you. Hence, the self-directed IRA.

Sure, you may love playing the stock market and enjoy the thrill ride of that roller coaster by way of its volatility. However, as a self-directed investor there’s no reason to limit your investing to stocks, bonds and mutual funds. In fact, most advisors may actually encourage diversification and alternative investing to allow you added control over your investment returns while providing a hedge against that volatility. Investment options include real estate, private equity, notes and loans, social causes, cryptocurrency, precious metals and more.

What do you already love?

Think about the investments you already know and understand—the ones you already love investing in, like real estate, precious metals, or private equity. As explained before, the list of possible investments through self-direction is long and enables individuals to take advantage of market opportunities and apply what they know to their tax-advantaged retirement account. For example:

• If you’re already doing fix & flip real estate investing, you can do so through your self-directed IRA.
• A friend is starting up a company and needs angel investors; your self-directed retirement plan can make that early-stage investment.
• You enjoy investing in energy-related assets like oil and gas; you can do so through your self-directed retirement plan.

Many types of retirement plans can be self-directed—a Traditional or Roth IRA, SIMPLE or SEP IRA, or solo 401(k), even health savings accounts (HSAs) and education savings accounts (ESAs). Depending on your goals and situation, you have plenty of options in terms of the type of plan to open. That flexibility may come in handy when you do retire and want a combination of tax-free and tax-deferred income, for example, or if you are self-employed or own a small business with employees.

Here’s more to love: opening a new self-directed IRA is easy and you can fund the new account the same way as you would any other plan—with a transfer from a like account, a rollover, or a personal contribution. At Next Generation, we simplify the process with our electronic starter kits that walk you through every step from opening the account through sending your instructions to our transaction specialists. As a third-party administrator and custodian of self-directed IRAs and other plans, we will review and execute investment transactions, custody asset(s) for our clients, provide recordkeeping and complete all necessary tax reporting.

Need more information? Contact us today.