Anne Marie Hollonds of Quest IRA discusses how you can put your money into work by opening self-directed IRA accounts either in real estate, private lending, or other investment vehicles. Anne Marie also shares their upcoming events and what they’re doing with education to help clients engage and build their financial goals. They regularly do free classes about notes, commercial deals, flipping, and other areas that people are interested which they share through Zoom or Facebook. They also allow those classes to be a platform for pitching as a way to find partners, deals, and raising capital. Anne stresses the importance of setting a goal and accomplishing it and tries to illustrate how important it is to start putting away money into an IRA account to finance your future.

Listen to the podcast here

Learn The Secrets to Million Dollar Savings Using Self-Directed IRA Accounts with Anne Marie Hollonds

 

I am honored to have with us our special guest, Anne Marie Hollonds from Quest IRA. Anne Marie, How are you doing?

Pretty good.

The year is flying by People are like, “Where are my goals? What have I done? I’ve already failed myself.” I just got back from a big marketing convention out in San Diego with6,500 other people and that’s one of the things I heard from people. ”I’m behind my goals. I don’t know how to accomplish them.”This is a good day. We have you here to talk about long-term goals. You guys had a tremendous February though. You had a really great growth in February with Quest.

Every year around this time, Nathan, our CEO does a big challenge for us and try to get our salespeople hit very high goals as far as account opening. The past month, we had to have 500 accounts. We’re happy to say that with a lot of hard work and lots of help from our good friends, lots of hard work from our salespeople, we did end up hitting the goals. We’re really excited about that.

That’s so exciting to see people taking advantage of opening self-directed IRA accounts and putting the money to work. You still have a tremendous amount of your clients that have money sitting there, making any type of return there.

We have a lot of our clients that come over to us and they’ll move funds over. They’re like, “I have to look around and figure out now. I realize I have to have self-directed, so I need to find some type of investment.”

One of the things that I’m talking with real estate investors and talking to a lot of people, especially if you’re an ex-financial advisor for JP Morgan Chase like I was, it’s always about planning. That’s the thing about having a self-directed IRA, you’re planning to put it to work in real estate or private lending, some investment vehicle. You don’t want just sitting there not getting anything, making 0% returns on your money or negative with fees and things like that. I always like to say, “Let’s set a goal.”Set a goal for yourself something to accomplish. If you go to my office, you’ll see I’ve got calendars and things up on and different dream boards, and stuff like that that we’re working towards. A lot of people slack off on that. They open an account, they’re like, “I opened an account. What do I do now?”What are some of your upcoming events that you guys got going that people can mark on their calendar to help them engage or help them build that financial dream?

If you’re brand new to Quest and even if you’re really not, if you’ve never taken advantage of the classes that what we do, that’s one of the best things that we offer because self-directed IRAs are new to so many people. They’re very attractive, but there’s definitely a learning curve. You have to be familiar with the rules and all the cool things that you can do with it as well. We do a lot of education at Quest every single Tuesday in our Houston office, twice a day. Then in Wednesdays, in our Dallas office, we do free classes that are about an hour long. It ranges from very entry level types of topic about self-directed IRAs, sometimes we’ll do classes about notes or we’ll do a class about commercial deals or flipping or whatever we’re hearing about that the people are interested in.

After the class, we also allow for deal pitching. It’s a great way to find a deal, find a partner, find some money or whatever you need. As I said, it will be there in Houston and Dallas, but we do simulcast them live through Zoom and also through Facebook. It’s hitting people all across the country. It’s not just Texas where we’re located.

I have to get in vouch for that because we’ve got a student and a friend of ours, David Arcizo who’s actually Greg’s father. Greg works here in the office. David is the religious attendee of your events there in Houston. He got up at the end of it and talked about a deal that he was working out on some deal. He was looking for funding. I don’t know exactly what the note deal was. Somebody was watching your live stream on Facebook from St. Louis, and the guy called up David afterwards, got his number because David gave his number from pitching the deal, and the guy called him and funded the transaction like $35,000 or $40,000. That’s what I love about you guys. You guys do a great job with technology, embracing it and getting the word out across social media and stuff like that when so many of the other companies out there isn’t doing that.

You have so much education going on, so much training on a regular basis. I’m honored to be the guest speaker at the Trillion Dollar Mixer here in Austin. You guys have a big Quest EXPO coming up in August which is a few months out. Do you want to share with people what’s going on with that and in your event here in April as well?

We do a lot of big events. Each year, we’re either hosting or participating or maybe we’re sponsoring or speaking at over 650 events every single year. We are everywhere in the industry. We definitely do a lot of events. The big ones that we’re highlighting, the one that you mentioned are our EXPOs. It’ll be our biggest event ever. We’re expecting 400 to 500 attendees. People are starting to register now that it’s getting a little bit closer. We’re seeing people that are registering from all over the country, so I know we have some people that are going to be coming in from California and we’ve got some people that are coming from the East Coast. We’re pretty excited. People from all over the country, not just Dallas or Texas people are going to be there. Basically, it’s a trade show style event.

It’ll be in Dallas. We have a Dallas office. It’s such a great market up there. We definitely want to tap into that and then bring a huge event up there. Throughout the weekend we’ll have lots of panels of experts and then we’ll have some individuals and distinguished sponsors who will be speaking. I know Scott’s one of them, we’re excited about that. We’ll have about 20 to 30 different vendors that will be participating, so it’ll be our largest scale event ever. We’ve got lots of surprises in store. We’re putting a casino night for the Saturday night, and all that good stuff. It’ll definitely be very educational. You’ll be able to meet lots of people that would be great for networking and just having fun too, because we like to make IRA a fun week. We like to have fun in this industry.

You also have your boot camp on the 14th of April, is that right?

We do have a boot camp. It’s a smaller scale event, but it’s a full day of education that’s jam-packed 9:00 AM to 6:00 PM. We have lots of speakers and then we have one big panel with all of our speakers at the end. We’re doing a special promotion this month. If you buy a ticket to that EXPO that I mentioned, that big event that we’re having, the biggest ever Quest event, you’ll get a free ticket to the Dallas boot camp as well, a nice little incentive especially if you live in Texas.

From attending a different Quest boot camps, it is a target-rich environment if you’re looking for private capital to grow yourself or looking for deals or people you’re going to venture with or partner with. It’s a phenomenal event. It’s what we’ve got it circled on our calendar to be at and that’s where we’ll go, excited to be a sponsor of it. Let’s talk about making money and raising capital, and things like that. The event I was at, there was an eight-year-old girl there who was raising money to end childhood hunger. She’s all dressed up on stage in front of 6,500 people talking about it. Somebody was asking her about what she’s trying to do. She said, “I wanted to raise a $1 million to literally help end childhood hunger in my area.” I was like, “That’s phenomenal.” Talking with people, you’re putting money away weekly, putting money monthly, you’re putting away quarterly for stuff like that.

Some other people like, “I’ve given up on that. I’m going to work for the rest of my life.” I’m like, “That kills me.”Last month, we talked about some different variety of funds. I pulled up an article that I want to share with people, Building A Million-Dollar Retirement Account. If you started putting money away at age twenty and you put $2 away a day and got 12% return on your money, by the time you reach 65, you’d have $1 million. It means you had to have put away $730 at twenty years old. Let’s bump it up to 25. At $3.57 a day, $109 a month, that’s $1,300 a year. When we’re 20 or 25, we’re thinking more about going up the club than putting away money. $1,300, it’s rent for a lot of young kids. When I was young I was having fun. Let’s start at 30 when we’re a little bit more responsible with our money. At $6.35 a day, I don’t know what Starbucks cost but that’s about the cost of a good cup of coffee. That’s $2,300. That’s still well within of having a Roth IRA. Roth is $5,500 a year, correct?

That’s correct when you’re under 50. Once you’re over 50, you got a little bit extra at $6,500 each year. You bring up a good point. It’s March so you still have a little bit of time left if you haven’t made your 2017 contribution. It’s a really good time to be putting that money away. If you haven’t done it, make sure to get it in. Additionally, if you’re close to 59 and a half, if you’re getting close to that retirement age, you should definitely be taking advantage of a Roth IRA and putting in money and getting that five-year clock started. Once you do get to retirement, if you’re doing investments in there, you’re going to be immediately able to start taking that money out tax-free.

It’s important for people to realize. Open it up. Start putting money away. This chart is based on if your money gets 12% compound and things like that. At $6.35 a day, if you put that away, you’re not going to see a lot of return on it immediately, but the compound effect of that, you’re making some different choices. If you start tithing to yourself or paying yourself first. What are some of the ways that people can deposit into their accounts? Is it a wire? Is it a check? Can they set up an ACH transaction or ACH deposit with you guys where it’s deducted? What are some of those features that they could be doing?

All of the above. A lot of times, clients would like to do something where they’re setting up a direct deposit. Every two weeks or every month, you’re getting your paycheck and a little bit pulling up, you’re not even seeing it. You get your statement at the end of the year from Quest, and you realize, “I’ve put in my contribution. I wasn’t even thinking about it.” Certainly, you can always just write a one-time check or do a wire from your account. It’s pretty easy to do. You have until April 17th this year so you do still have a little bit of time to get that. In addition, you can make your 2018 contribution. If you’ve never had an account, it’s a really nice time because you’re able to put in essentially double the money. If you’re trying to start doing deals, certainly you can take advantage of borrowing some other people’s funds. It is an easy way to bulk it up this time of the year, too.

If you look at age 40, $625 a month in savings, that’s $312 basically every two weeks or bi-monthly, if you’re getting paid the first and the 15th. That’s not a hard thing to do. In some cases, $300 does make a big difference if you’re struggling to get by. I’m not talking to go out and finance the future, if you can’t pay your bills today and put food on the table. If you start looking at some of the things that you do, if you’re doing a note deal and you’re getting a couple of hundred bucks a month and positive cash flow, instead of putting that money back into your pocket, start an IRA. Start your accounts or putting that extra into it. Start to deposit that money into a monthly. If you’re using other people’s money, great. Your return on investment is infinite. If you’re paying them and you’re getting any money off of the extra, then start an account. Set up some automatic savings in place, automatic savings features, direct deposit, things like that. When we get to April 15^th, I guarantee everybody is in the downers for one or two reasons. One, they got to pay Uncle Sam a big fat check or they didn’t max out their contributions. What are some of the accounts that can be deducted from your income to reduce your tax accountability?

Accounts like the self-directed, traditional IRA or SEP-IRA are two really popular accounts. With both of those, if you’re within the income thresholds and economically just do a quick Google search, it’ll pop right up on there. If you’re under the threshold, you’re going to be able to take a tax deduction on your contribution. You’re benefiting today, especially with the SEP-IRA. If you’re qualified for that self-employment type of account, you can put in up to $54,000 each year into it. It’s a very significant chunk compared to a traditional or Roth IRA, which for the most part people are moving existing plans over. Definitely, if you can take advantage of something like that that’s going to allow you to put the most in. I saw a case study online from Suze Orman. It was a good example and it showed two fairly young people that were preparing for saving. One of them started saving in her twenties and then one of them started saving in her 30s.You wouldn’t think that was just ten years difference that it would make that much difference.

It was something $400,000 difference because of the contributions each year and then the compound interest and all that. It was such a significant difference in the amount that they could save. It’s a really good example and it’s definitely something in class that we try to portray certainly for our staff because we’ve got a lot of young people. A lot of our clients have prepared well for retirement and are doing well for themselves. Trying to pass these things onto your kids as well or your grandkids that are just trying to learn about that, that’s a great tool that you can give your college age or high school age kids and starting to teach them, especially with something like a Roth IRA. As soon as your kids have earned income, they can be starting to put money in there. If your kids have a summer job or something, there’s no reason why at fifteen years old, they can be setting that up and making those small contributions then because in the long run, that’s going to help them.

If you have an ESA, they can put up to $2,000 a year into that, correct?

Yeah, in addition to.

In addition to them having a Roth IRA that they can put their money in and they’re saying, “When I was a young kid from twelve on, I was busy mowing lawns and clean brush, putting things together for little old ladies in my hometown. I couldn’t put stuff together. I was happy making $3 an hour.” I look at that now, I wouldn’t ever work for $3 an hour but it was a different time 30 years ago. You have a special list running in this month as well too. Don’t you want to talk a little about that?

Around this time of year, it’s past times so people are already thinking about it, that’s when we tend to do some promotion. Definitely take advantage of those while they are available, because that’s not something that sticks around throughout the entire year. The promotion that we’re doing this month to celebrate Saint Patrick’s Day and the pot of gold and all of that is basically, if you set up your account with Quest, you’ll get a $125 credit to your account which pays through your first transaction. You set up your account and then once you find your deal, you have that in the back of your head that your first deal is going to be completely free with Quest. That’s definitely a good incentive. In addition, that promotion that I already talked about with the EXPO, if you buy a ticket to the Quest EXPO, you’ll also get a free ticket to the Dallas bootcamp. The great thing about that is it’s really a good deal because the Dallas boot camp tickets are like$100 apiece. If you’re thinking about going to any of those, certainly buy that EXPO ticket, then you get a free ticket to the Dallas boot camp as well.

You’re just giving money away to help people incentivizing things, actions and stuff like that. $125 you credit for your first transaction which is phenomenal for everybody. If you were 25 years old, that’s almost exactly need to put away each month. $109 a month towards your $1 million savings by the time you turned 65. What would you say the average age is of a Quest client?

It’s all across the board, I would say around maybe 40 or so. It’s what we see. Lately, I’ve been seeing a lot of younger people coming to our class are people in their twenties. It’s a generational thing, a lot of young people, millennials right now are realizing, “I’m $100,000 in debt, $50,000 in debt. I’m going to have to do something different and we’re watching our parents. We’re seeing maybe they’re not able to retire at 60 or 65 and we’re realizing that things have to be different.”I definitely have seen an increase in a lot of young people that seems to be getting more interested in saving for the future. We certainly have a lot of people that are going to be at retirement age. Once you’re about 55, 60 years old and you are starting to retire, that’s when they’re going to be moving over like employer plans and things like that from their old job. It’s all across the board, but I would say around 40 or so. It’s an average that we’re seeing.

You’ve got some older folks and some younger folks, early 40s and mid-40s probably the median age therefore. If you’re at your45, you need to be saving $38.2 a day, $1,100 a month, $1,157 a month and under just under $14,000 a year for the next twenty years to hit your $1 million savings if you’re getting 12% of your money. At 12%, oftentimes we see that with the performing loans and I get a lot of phone calls from people, “I’m looking for performing loans. What returns can I expect?” Somewhere between 8% to 15% yield on performing loans, it’s probably where you’re going to see it and you can pick up another two at $25,000, $26,000 to put it to work there for you and get rock and rolling. If you had a $500,000 and you could buy a nice little chunk of portfolio of performing loans. Actually, paper’s one of the biggest makeups of Quest portfolio. Do you have a lot of notes on there?

About 48% of our clients are doing notes. It’s actually the most common investment. People think self-directed IRAs and you’re always doing slipping a property or something like that, and that’s not the case. It seems like a lot of times, people may start and then they graduate towards doing something more passive. Then they realize ideally for the rest of your life, it may not be an investment that you’re wanting to do, dealing with toilets and tenants and all of that. Note is definitely something that’s attractive to people just because of the passive approach.

Let’s say you’re performing or non-performing or lending money on to fix and flippers, we see a lot of that. I talked with Jason Bible, Chris Wagner, couple big guys there in Houston that are doing some big stuff and making some things happen. Majority of their funding is coming from self-directed IRA investors or the lenders on that side of things. A lot of people don’t realize is everybody is in the paper game. It’s just that most of the time you’re on the wrong side of it whether you’re paying versus receiving in. You guys have an amazing portal. You’ve got some upgrades and some things to it. Is there as well people can make their directly through the portal, is that correct?

That’s a new feature that we have. We’re getting so much good feedback about it, basically when it’s time to make a note payment, for example, instead having the old school and maybe write out a check or set something up or do a wire from your bank, you’re able to just directly pay through our website like through just an ACH. The same goes for all investments. It’s great for note certainly but it can be other things, too. We’ve created the ability that reverse, maybe if you’re not a Quest client, but you’re paying a Quest client for their funds, but also reversed if you’re disbursing funds from the account too. If you are someone that’s doing something like a rehab in your IRA, then certainly you can disburse funds as well. We’re really trying to do a lot of these modern advances. We try to listen to our clients and get a lot of feedback. We have our systems team working in the background trying to put that all together.

We had a client of yours weekend before last, who was talking about how they had to deal, need to pay their attorney fees out of their IRA. They’re like, “I’m going to Quest.” I said, “No, you can go directly to the portal now and get that done.” They’re like, “I forgot about that. Are you sure?” “I’m a 100% sure you can do it because we do that as well.”

That’s one of the cool things about using Quest, using self-directed IRAs. Obviously you’re getting to have personal control over the investments and the yields and all of that in your account. Not just that, when you’re dealing with a self-directed company like Quest, it’s a smaller company. You’re actually talking to our staff. You can actually get your feedback right to the top. People are actually listening to you. It’s a very different experience when you’re working with these large financial types of companies, and there’s nothing wrong with that necessarily. The beauty of self-directed working with a smaller company is that your voice can be heard not just in the investments that you’re choosing, but in advances or changes in systems and things like that that you want to. That’s a really important thing that people aren’t always talking about, too.

We’ve got a couple of questions here, “Is there a way to have my employer sponsored 401(k) move to Quest without having to leave my current employer?”

For the most part, you have to have that separation of service. If you want to check on it, more and more companies have provisions in their plan that is allowing people to move it. Sometimes maybe you’ve worked there for X amount of years or you have a certain dollar amount within the account and then you’re eligible. If you want to check on that, you could either double check with the actual custodian that’s holding the employer plan or you could check maybe if you have a large human resources department. They should know as well. It would be called doing an in-service rollover, and then it would move to a self-directed traditional IRA or perhaps a Roth IRA. You can start using it for all these deals that you’re finding.

Sometimes you have different plans. Sometimes they’ll allow you to move things. We’ve been there for a year or two years. It all depends on what aspect of it because a lot of times, you’ll have a 401(k) companies, they’ll have a provision set in place. Where you’ve got their 401(k), which they’re contributing to and they may also light open like a Roth or things like that. You could probably move the Roth over are relatively easy. It’s just that the accounts that they’re matching is what they want to hold on to for the most part. We have a question, this was going back to where we’re talking about the annual contribution limits. “The annual limits for contribution. Is that in total? I have a health account and I’m wondering if I should open a Roth as well?” Let’s list the accounts that people can have individually and the contribution limits for each one of those again.

Basically at Quest, there are seven different accounts that we offer. The one thing I will mention that you’re asking, “Can I move my 401(k) over?” If for some reason you could not move your 401(k)over, just be aware that you can still have an IRA and a 401(k). It seems like it’s a common misconception that people will think it’s an either or situation and it’s not. You might not be able to take a tax deduction on having both the traditional and the 401(k)or a Roth and having a 401(k), but you can put the money into both and max them out. As far as for traditional and Roth, the max that you can put in is $5,500 to $6,500 depending on your age. It is a total, so if I have a traditional and a Roth, the total is $5,500.It’s not $55 for each, for example. Then you mentioned you have a health savings account. The contributions actually went up this year. If you have a family style plan, you can put in addition $6,900.For a lot of people, you’re able to get a tax deduction on that.

Once you’re doing your deals in your self-directed health savings account, when it comes time to take off those profits because you have some type of medical expense, it’s all coming out tax-free. I have an agent there. I love it. It’s a great type of plan. I needed to go to the dentist. At the beginning of the year, I would go get my eyes checked and get my new contacts. I was able to pay for those completely tax free just by doing deals in there. Certainly little health expenses are important because you’re going to be able to pay for those tax-free and save extra money that you can be putting into retirement accounts or into investments. Other than that, we’ve got lots of other great accounts. We mentioned the SEP-IRA that’s for people that are self-employed. We’ve got two other self-employment types of plans.

Then also the education savings account that you mentioned earlier. That one essentially can be used for your kids from birth all the way up to age 30 for their education expenses. You’re doing your real estate deals, your note deals, and your private company types of investments in there. Then once you have your profit, you can withdraw them tax free for your kids’ education expenses. If you need to buy books or uniforms or maybe they’re struggling in a subject and they need to get a tutor, you can pay the tutor tax free from that. You can even get things like Wi-Fi in your house or laptops, other types of equipment. It’s very, very broad in terms of all the things that you can do in the account and all the process. Certainly, we see lots of Quest clients that may have a little of each type of account sometimes.

We have a question here, “Can my IRA joint venture with my LLC?”

It would just depend on the structure of it. What you wouldn’t be able to do is necessarily have your IRA and the LLC setup where your IRA invested the funds into the LLC and then you were managing it. If we structure those two separate, it was your LLC and your IRA and we structured it in a certain way then yes, you would be able to do that. We have private entities department at Quest that does all of the processing for it. Once everything is structured, once you have everything drawn up with the managing member, your attorneys and all that good stuff. Once you submitted to Quest and will be able to disburse those funds out within about 24 to 48 hours.

One of the big things with the profits are coming from there and they had to get back into the LLC or the IRA evenly depending on the amount invested, right?

What you couldn’t do, for example, is invest maybe a little bit in your IRA funds and then mostly your LLC funds. Then when you make your profits, have all your profits go back into the IRA without the tax and nothing goes back to your LLC. Whatever proportionate amounts that you’re putting forward for the purchase of the investment, whatever that may be, is again how you’re going to receive those profits back. That’s the beauty of Quest is there are some technical roles, but you don’t have to be the expert. That’s why all of our education is free. That’s why we have all the Certified IRA Specialist on staff. If you find a deal, you’re tossing around, your head wandering if this is something that you can do. Give us a call. We have people on staff that can walk you through the rules so that you’re familiar.

Your private entities department is phenomenal. I’ve got on the phone with Denise over there a couple times and other people going through documents, “We’re joint venturing the people,” and things like that too. It’s very, very easy to deal with, much faster than any other companies I might say too. What other questions do you guys and gals have for Ms. Anne Marie out there on either your accounts, opportunities, limits, different things that are available? Everybody can have an IRA or Traditional IRA or Roth or either or $5,500 annual contribution if you’re below 50.Then a self-employed is how much was it a 25% of your income up to what $44,000, is that right?

Yeah, up to $54,000. You got it.

You can have that along with a Roth or Traditional depending on how you qualify.

A lot of times you’re able to max out the contributions for many of these types of accounts where I think the misconception comes as more so and possibly taking deductions and things like that. Like I said, you can do a quick Google search and then find the chart, but look with your CPA, it’s past time. If you are thinking about doing this, it’s a really good time to be looking at all the options that you have for the different accounts.

Once again everybody, you can check out Quest IRA by going to QuestIRA.com or get me on the phone and dial 1-888-FUNIRAS. Anne Marie and the whole staff of amazing IRA Specialists are standing by, ready to age your questions, ready to help you get accounts set up and get your rock and rolling. Getting you one step closer to that $1 million portfolio whether it’s a $2 a day, the $2 bill per day if you’re 20 or a $156 a day, if you’re 55. Important to take advantage of what’s available out there guys. Take advantage of the things that are offered. Start setting up some good plans, those are other things like Anne Marie mentioned Suze Orman, talking about putting money away each month. A lot of people forget about that as real estate entrepreneurs and real estate investors, always worry about the closing. They will take care when it happens with closings.

You know that when we get those big checks, we’d love to cash them and put them in the account and we start going shopping. Start shopping for your retirement a little bit earlier. Start tithing to yourself. Taking advantage of that because that money there you can use on some deals, but it’s best to put it away now, so it’s there in the future when you need it. If there’s no other questions or anything else, Anne Marie, thank you for joining us. You have some great stuff going on. You’ve got Trillion Dollar Mixer this month. You’ve got a boot camp next month. You got the EXPO on August.

 

Important Links

• Anne Marie Hollonds
• Quest IRA
• David Arcizo
• Suze Orman
• QuestIRA.com
• Jason Bible
• Chris Wagner
• Trillion Dollar Mixer
• event
• boot camp

 

About Anne Marie Hollonds

Anne Marie Hollonds is a Marketing Director at Quest IRA, the premier Self-Directed IRA company. After graduating from St. Edward’s University in Austin, Texas, Anne Marie joined Quest IRA as an IRA Specialist. In 2014, Anne Marie received the designation of Certified IRA Services Professional from the Institute of Certified Bankers, making her one of the youngest CISPs in the United States. Anne Marie regularly attends conferences, workshops and does local radio interviews, where she publicly speaks about the benefits of self-direction.

• Here’s How »

• WeCloseNotes.com
• The Note Closers Show Facebook
• The Note Closers Show Twitter
• Scott Carson LinkedIn
• The Note Closers Show YouTube
• The Note Closers Show Vimeo
• The Note Closers Show Instagram
• We Close Notes Pinterest