Unlock Your IRA For Real Estate Gains by Henry Yoshida

We unpack how to use self-directed IRAs to buy real estate, fund syndications, and even do hard money loans while keeping the same tax advantages as traditional retirement accounts. Henry Yoshida explains the rules, the risks, and how to get started without friction.

• Using IRAs to invest in private real estate
• How rental income and gains are taxed inside IRAs
• Roth IRA benefits for long‑term real estate growth
• Who self‑directed IRAs fit best and why timing matters
• Hard money lending terms and execution via an IRA
• Diversifying into LPs, syndications, and crypto
• Why institutions allocate to private markets
• Platform steps to open, fund, and deploy capital
• Guardrails, paperwork, and keeping expenses inside the IRA
• Word of the week: curiosity as an investing edge

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Transcript

Season Eight Kickoff & Guest Intro

Dwan Bent-Twyford 0:47

Hey everybody, welcome to the most dwanderful real estate podcast ever. I'm your host, Dwan Bent Twyford, and the podcast is the most Dwanderful real estate podcast ever. So I took my name Dwan and Wonderful and then made a new word, and that's how I came up with Dwanderful. So you are at the beginning of season eight. We are just this close and being away from two million downloads. So like, listen, share, subscribe. I'm just like just on the precipice of hitting two million downloads, which is super exciting for me. And again, it's season eight, and we're just here, we're having fun. I've got some super great guests this year, and we're just gonna up our game and up our game and keep learning more and more and more about real estate. And again, you know, you heard it in the intro to find me, just wonderful anywhere. Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, threads, just wonderful. And I'm there's no place that I'm not. Let's just put it that way. So I've got a great guest today, very handsome man. Uh can't oh, you know, I should have um asked you to pronounce so is it Yoshida? Wait, wait, Yoshida?

Henry Yoshida 1:59

Yoshida, that's exactly right.

Dwan Bent-Twyford 2:01

Okay, I should have just asked before I said so. Henry, I got Yoshida. Right. Okay, I actually have uh a lot of Japanese friends and both and I don't know if you're Japanese, I'm just I am the name. Okay, my both of my daughters speak fluent Japanese and they travel to Japan all the time, and so I have a lot of Japanese friends, so I'm pretty good with the names.

Henry Yoshida 2:26

Okay in Japan.

What Rocket Dollar Actually Does

Dwan Bent-Twyford 2:27

Yeah, so both my daughters in high school, you know how high school they give you like a choice to learn, like I don't know, in in the mountains where we live, it's uh French and Spanish, and they wanted to take Japanese, so they got special permission. They went to a little community college and learned Japanese, and they've been speaking it forever and ever. They're in their late 30s now, fluent as they could be.

Henry Yoshida 2:48

Wow, that's that's impressive.

Dwan Bent-Twyford 2:50

Yeah, that's fun. They love it. And I love the whole I love everything about it too. So anyway, Henry, thank you for being on the show today. I'm super excited to have you. I'm excited to hear about your topic and to get to know you.

Henry Yoshida 3:04

Sure. Uh, you know, I appreciate you having me on. And you know, I talk a lot about real estate. It makes me think now that I need to go talk to my daughters. So uh I am Japanese American, uh, but I was born here. And both of my daughters are trying to learn Japanese on Duolingo, but they're not fluent in any way. So I need to get them moving a little bit on that.

Dwan Bent-Twyford 3:22

So Yeah, and then my oldest daughter, um, she got when she got her degree, she has some kind of international degree. So she for a long time uh from America would teach uh would she worked with some kind of school and they would teach online and teach the Japanese kids to speak English. So she's been teaching and they just stay up with it and they they go every year and run a Disney marathon and just an excuse to get over into Japan, which I think is pretty cool because we live way in the mountains in Colorado in the middle of nowhere, and nobody up there travels or speaks anything, and nothing like nothing exciting happens up there. So that's my that's my girls right there. So okay, so Henry, uh, thank you for being on the show today. So, what we actually do is I just kind of throw my guests to the wolves a little bit. I just want you to tell us in like a sentence or two what you do and how everyone can find you across all the social medias, and then I've got some questions.

Henry Yoshida 4:22

Okay, perfect. That was a lot of sheets of paper, uh, Dwan. But uh, so myself, I'm Henry Yoshida, and I've been in financial services um uh both as a corporate employee and entrepreneur for the last 25 years, and I specialize in tax-advantaged accounts. So currently, I started in 2018 a business called Rocket Dollar, uh, and uh we're very much tied to real estate. We are an IRA platform that lets people open IRA accounts digitally on our website, keep the same tax treatments of IRAs and 401ks that you know, but instead of stocks, funds, and mutual funds, our customers are able to purchase private and alternative investments. So real estate is about 40% of the $12 billion of assets that we have, uh, and those are in tax-deferred IRA accounts. And then uh, you know, myself, it's pretty easy to find us. So we are at rocketdollar.com. So we own that at that handle at on X, Instagram. Uh you could find that on LinkedIn. Uh, I'm also there personally. I think I'm the only Henry Yoshida. Uh although Yoshida is kind of the equivalent of almost the last name Smith or Williams in Japan. So it's it's unusual here, very popular over there in Japan. Uh, but I'm pretty easy to find. So Henry Yoshida or Rocket Dollar at LinkedIn, Instagram, or just rocketdollar.com. We have one of the main things that we did when we started the business in 18 was that uh our site actually started as more of an education repository for people who have questions about real estate investing using tax advantaged accounts like IRAs, and it's kind of grown from there. So we have upwards of 500 to 600 articles that get indexed pretty heavily, actually higher than the main website itself for people looking for that information, whether they use us as a platform or not. Uh but you know, we're pretty proud of what we built. So we're 180 employees. Uh, our trust is headquartered in the state of Nevada. Operational headquarters for Rocket Dollar is in Austin, Texas, where I'm at. And um, you know, we serve, again, customers all over the country, roughly totaling 12 billion and about. Uh 4.5 to 5 billion roughly is actually in real estate right now.

Real Estate Inside IRAs: Tax Mechanics

Dwan Bent-Twyford 6:28

Nice. I love it. Okay, so that was a really great, nice, simple, easy explanation. I love it when people can just do that and not end up going for like 25 minutes. It's like, I've got questions. We're gonna get there. I promise you. All right, so um, so tell me about the tax advantages. I think as a real estate investor, the the thing we want to know is, you know, obviously how to always pay less taxes.

Henry Yoshida 6:54

Yeah. And and remember, you know, what it usually ends up happening for us is that people who become our customers, they typically, if they want to do real estate using a rocket dollar IRA, they probably already own uh real estate, not inside of an IRA. You know, they have experience being a real estate investor, whether that's on purpose or you know, you get a lot of the accidental landlords, you know, they've kind of just moved from house to house and they just never sold the house that they moved from. Um I'm sure you guys have had a show on that particular topic before. But um I think the problem we solve more is that at some point uh you run out of capital to continue purchasing properties. And when you look around, a lot of people have their accumulated monies in these IRAs and 401k accounts. So right now in the US, uh the number at the end of 2020, uh third end of the third quarter of 2025, it takes them a while to count this because the number's so high, but there's close to $46 trillion in United States retirement accounts. So um if you own real estate as an investment outside of an IRA, you know, you're used to being able to work and uh deduct all the expenses, take a depreciation. But if you own it inside of an IRA, none of that stuff applies. The only tax advantage there is that you end up purchasing the property, and whenever someone pays you rent to stay in said property, if it's in an IRA, that rental income is not taxable as ordinary income. It's kind of just given back to the IRA and there's no taxes on it. So there's no depreciation, none of that because it's inside of an IRA. There's no capital gains inside of that account. So what we really found is that most people are using their IRA to purchase real estate because they have additional monies there. They want to purchase more properties. It's just that that's where the capital's at at this point. So they end up using that. And then now you have a different set of tax advantages, which are that there's no taxes on any rental income stream that comes in on the property, and then there's no taxes on that gain of that property either, uh uh, until you start to take money outside of the IRA out of the IRA. And if it's a Roth, uh, then there's no taxes whatsoever at all. So the income will come in, you'll accumulate that cash, the property will increase in value over time. And when you sell it, there'll be no tax on the gain at that property in a Roth IRA. So that's a pretty powerful tool for a lot of people.

Dwan Bent-Twyford 9:06

It is very powerful. So you all allow people to come in and set up an IRA within your company.

Henry Yoshida 9:14

Yeah. So we are an IRA platform. So no different than the IRAs that you'd have through uh maybe like traditional brokerage providers like a Vanguard or Merrill Lynch, uh, or Vanguard or Fidelity, or one that you would get to a financial advisor like Merrill Lynch or Edward Jones. So we're no different. Uh it's just that our IRAs are built for people to own private and alternative investments, of which real estate is one of those asset classes.

Dwan Bent-Twyford 9:36

Aaron Powell So what are some of the other asset classes?

Henry Yoshida 9:39

So other ones that we've seen, and we have about 9,000 registered different investments, but the most popular categories are real estate number one. Uh number two is actually just a limited partnership investment. So you just basically write a check to become an investor in a private fund. And that fund could be in private equity for companies, it could be in private equity for real estate. Uh real estate syndications are another big one. So when I say real estate, I'm talking about just uh a directly owned real estate. So another segment of our customer base actually does investments into things like syndications, or they even do hard money lending. That's another asset class. Um really like think tangible things. They can invest directly in a small private company, they can invest directly in real estate, of which we talked about, or they can become a limited partner in a private, non-registered fund. Um so and that fund could invest in anything from companies to real estate. And then probably on the other side of the spectrum, if we're kind of looking at investments from like a tangible, uh, you know, lower risk, more understandable um uh type of asset class, the other side of the spectrum could be crypto. So that's actually our third largest asset class overall is uh digital assets and cryptocurrency. Because I think the on that side, it's there's high potential for return. Um so people will put money that's earmarked for long-term investing, which is what your IRAs and 401ks are with great tax treatment, and maybe just kind of make a bet today in 2025 or 2020 or 2015 that it'll be worth significantly more, and you want to minimize the tax uh burden on that uh in an IRA account in the year 2030, 35 and 40 and 45.

Dwan Bent-Twyford 11:15

That's right. So uh obviously people should do IRAs and get a four, they should always do things like that when they're younger. But can anybody come along at any age and go like, hey, I'm 50 years old, you know, I'm gonna need more money to retire with. Let me get inside this uh this IRA over here and and put money in, be a part of a fund, be a part of something. So at any point, someone can come to you, open one up, and is there a limit on the amount of money? I know there's a limit on what they can put in, but if it's pretty low. They can keep dumping that back in.

Who Should Use Self-Directed IRAs

Henry Yoshida 11:48

Exactly. And you know, our our typical customer is someone, we're probably not someone's first IRA account. So you're right. So if we get back to like, you know, all the advice that we would tell ourselves or what we spend our time telling our adult children or nieces, nephews, like anyone sort of starting out in the working world, uh, we might say that, hey, look, you know, always do that, uh uh put away some portion of every dollar you earn uh towards savings and investment inside of a tax-efficient account, like an IRA. If you work for a company, you do that into a 401k. So what our typical customer is is maybe more along the lines of mid-career, where they've actually had some monies accumulated in these accounts through their jobs. The IRA contributions are pretty low, so most people accumulate more money quickly and in larger amounts in a company-sponsored 401k. And as they move from job to job through their career, they accumulate monies, and now they have an amount where they're uncomfortable with 100% of that money being, let's say, inside of just an index fund tied to the SP 500, the 500 largest public companies. They want to diversify a little bit. So they would take a portion and open up an account here at Rocket Dollar and then move existing IRA or old 401k money into that. Uh so uh we're kind of set up not really as a starter account. I think there's other providers out in the marketplace that that really let you start an account at zero. Um, we kind of liken ourselves as maybe where you'd go if you're looking to diversify your existing IRA and 401k money, and you have at least a $10,000 or $15,000 or $20,000 private investment first time to make. Uh, obviously, if you're purchasing something like real estate directly, you'd have to have a lot more. So this is someone who might have accumulated $500,000 and decides to take $250,000, move it to a rocket dollar IRA from their fidelity IRA, and then purchase an entire property outright uh just as a way of diversifying, and or a way to own something that's more tangible to them uh in the form of real estate versus a uh digital piece of paper, which is Yeah, I love that.

Dwan Bent-Twyford 13:47

I love that because I know um I mean I've been investing for 35 years, but I just remember way back, like maybe in the 90s, people were talking about if you have an IRA, move it into, I think, uh, maybe forgetting this because it's been decades since I talked about it. I move it into uh a Roth or something where you can take it out, take some money out, put it down as an investment on the property, sell the property, take the profit it, put it back in. And people were starting to like, oh, I can use that money to invest in other things and then put that profit back in there, which allows a higher amount getting put in on a yearly basis. But I seem to remember, like, I don't know what kind of IRAs were coming around at that time. And a lot of people were switching out, at least the people I knew, into things they could use to invest with.

Henry Yoshida 14:37

Okay. Well, you so when uh once money's inside of a 401k or IRA, they kind of stay in those types of accounts. That's how you keep that sort of tax shield. And you're able to continue growing all those monies until uh uh age 59 and a half. I don't know how they came up with this number, but uh but uh it's always been 59 and a half for the entirety of when I've since I've been working with these accounts, and that was starting in the year 2000 uh in 2001 timeframe. But um uh after 59 and a half, then you're able to take money out uh probably to what you're talking about and just pay taxes on the exact amount that you take out. So even if you have a $500,000 account uh and you decide to withdraw $100,000 to go do something with it, then you would only pay tax on that $100,000, not on $500,000 because that's the amount that you took out. And um uh you know what we found is that people like to leave monies in these accounts, and then there's a different age to where when you turn 72, you have to start taking money out of the account because at that point the government realizes that you're closer to dying uh and they've never received any tax money on it. So then and it's a pretty uh I guess draconian term, but it's a required minimum distribution. But really, it's that at this point you're expected to only live for 10 more years and you haven't paid any taxes. So we are gonna require you to take some money out every year for the next 10 years and until we we think you're gonna die on average.

Dwan Bent-Twyford 16:05

Death and taxes, death and taxes, death and taxes.

Henry Yoshida 16:07

Anyway, yeah, and this is where they're combined to each other. So they they they realize that okay, now they know that you're gonna die, but you haven't paid taxes. So now they're gonna make you pay taxes, knowing that your death is imminently coming. So I know.

Dwan Bent-Twyford 16:19

I'm turning 67 in a couple weeks. It's like, golly, 67. I don't even know how that happened that I got that old. It's like I'm way closer to the end now than you know I used to be. And for some reason, this is the first year I've actually thought about like wow, 67. My next big birthday is 70. Like, how many big decade birthdays do you have after that, you know?

Henry Yoshida 17:16

Right.

Dwan Bent-Twyford 17:17

1980, maybe a 90, but it's like, not bad, 60.

Henry Yoshida 17:20

So I'd probably say 110.

Dwan Bent-Twyford 17:23

So I don't know. You know, I have a really super longevity. My aunt right now is 99 years old, she lives in Tennessee, she walks two miles a day. My mom is 89, my other aunt is 87, my aunt that just passed away was 102. So it's like super longevity on my mom's side with all the women. So I'm hoping I inherit that.

Henry Yoshida 17:44

Well, I think you're you're well on your way. You look you look young, healthy, like you're gonna go walk two miles right after the show.

Beyond Property: LPs, Syndications, Crypto

Dwan Bent-Twyford 17:50

So I do. When I'm in Florida, I'm in Florida, right? We have a house in Florida. But I'm in Florida, I walk like three, four, five miles a day. And our other residence is in the the like the mountain mountains, the 8,000 feet in Colorado. I go out there to walk like a half a mile, and I'm just like altitude. So I don't exercise as much there because the altitude is like murder. But down here, I'm like paddle boarding and bike riding, and I'm running every day. And then I get back up there and I become like a house hermit. So now you guys, so your fund is taking the money that everybody's paying in and uh doing investor funds, doing syndications. So that is how the money in there, opposed to I know some IRAs just work like off the stock market or the the markets and things. Your fund is investing and doing things in the hard money, giving loans, the fund itself, giving loans, doing it.

Henry Yoshida 18:49

We don't we don't manage the funds themselves, so we just provide the platform. So ironically enough, that uh when I started the business, you know, we kind of are in the business of giving people uh access to their own money uh because as you mentioned just a second ago, that of that $46 trillion that sits in U.S. retirement accounts right now, over 99% of that money is actually invested in only publicly registered securities, 90, you know, uh stock bonds, mutual funds. But you know, so what Rocket Dollar is is a platform that lets people take those retirement monies, but instead of stock bonds and mutual funds, if they know of an investment opportunity that happens to be private, they can facilitate and make that transaction. So um the beauty of our platform is that people kind of decide what they want to invest in that's not public because I mean, you know, you said yourself that you live up in the mountains in Colorado. So if you were eyeing an investment property somewhere uh, you know, outside the Denver area or somewhere closer to you in the mountains in Colorado or where you you have your place in Florida where you're at now, then you're much more equipped to know what might be an opportunity uh for real estate investment and appreciation than I would be. So we don't sponsor a fund. Uh ironically enough, we just give people access to their own money. Uh so one of our taglines is that we help you unlock your retirement money to go do investments that your other providers won't let you do. So that could be real estate, crypto, or invest in a private company or in a syndication for real estate, or you could hard do hard money lending yourself. So one of the largest uptick categories. Yeah, I really like that.

Dwan Bent-Twyford 20:22

I don't know any other fund that does that. So this is really great. So I didn't mean to interrupt you. So I I'm in there and I say, hey, I've got all this money in there. I would like to do some hard money lending. Do I find the people to lend the money to, or do you find the people?

Henry Yoshida 20:39

You would find the people because you probably want to lend money to people that you trust, like let's say a developer you've worked with and you know that, hey, they're good for this. And um, you know, it just happens to be that they're they're at the cap of what they can get from the normal bank channels right now, but they need another $200,000. So you would negotiate yourself a contract uh with that individual. Let's say, I don't know, uh probably the going rate right now, just using today's early 2026 numbers for a hard money l loan on 14 to 18 month term might be 13 to 17 percent. Yeah. And you negotiate that, you uh provide us that paperwork as your IRA provider. We basically then see the paperwork and we disperse that money to the to the person you're lending money to. And then as they make payments back, uh uh the interest payments, and then the principal later, that goes back into your IRA. And the beauty of that 13 to 17 is that since you did it inside of an IRA, it's actually tax-free. So depending on what your tax rate is, that real return could be uh 17% divided by 0.7 if your tax rate's 30%, and you're effectively making a 20 point 20.5 or 21% rate on that money, not 17, because you're not paying taxes on it.

Dwan Bent-Twyford 21:51

No, I love that. Yeah, I don't think I'm familiar with it. I mean, I I just don't think I'm familiar with anyone that has a fund like that, like what you guys have. Like this is like the thing all real estate investors should be putting the money into.

Hard Money Lending With An IRA

Henry Yoshida 22:04

Well, and it's been around. So I ironically enough, this has been a capability that's existed since the beginning of IRAs. So IRAs were created in 1974, so they're a little over 50 years old here in the U.S. Uh that's the same law that created 401ks. But um it's just that the industry that that came up around it were companies that specialized in providing stocks and creating and selling mutual funds. So they really didn't want to give access to allow people to take their IRAs and 401k monies to invest in something that's not a stock bond or mutual fund because uh it it'd be you know, I kind of like and I use the analogy of of that Trader Joe's and Costco basically make a living off of selling a lot of their private label items inside the store. You know, it doesn't make a lot of sense for them to have 90 percent of things that that aren't their brands in the store. It's 90 percent of things that are their things inside that store. So the reason why you buy stocks, bonds, and mutual funds, or the average American for the most part buys stocks, bonds, and mutual funds inside their IRA at Fidelity, Vanguard, Merrill Lynch, Edward Jones, you name it, is because those same companies are also in the business of creating, manufacturing, and facilitating the sale of stocks or mutual funds or bonds. So they really don't want you to buy a single-family home outside of Orlando, Florida, for example. Yeah. They don't make any money off of that. The you know the money would leave their IRA and go into that. So that's why we ourselves are just the facilitation platform. So we're an IRA platform, people find their own investments. And um, you know, when I told you earlier that 99% of the money in U.S. retirement accounts are in stocks, bonds, and mutual funds. Well, if you look at what they consider quote unquote the smart investors, so think like college endowment funds, municipal uh retirement systems and pension plans and so forth, what what you're gonna find there is that 50% of the money that they have to invest is not in public investments. They're in private investments. They own, ironically enough, buildings, private uh their limited partners and private equity funds. So we make the average American person able to access an account of money that or a pool of money that they already have with long-term treatment and great tax uh advantages to go do private investments the way that the biggest and baddest investors in the world do right now. They've always been a 50-50.

Dwan Bent-Twyford 24:24

I love it. Now, I know that none of these funds can ever guarantee, you know, uh a guaranteed interest rate per year that you're gonna earn. And I think don't most of the big giant mutual funds, don't they average like seven percent a year or something like that?

Henry Yoshida 24:39

Well, that that's the uh the weird thing.

Dwan Bent-Twyford 24:41

So based on like, you know, what's going on, who's the president, who's getting bonds.

Henry Yoshida 24:45

Yeah, that's if you take that's if you take all of them. But there's mutual funds that invest in all different things. So some that just invest in international stocks, some that invest in only United States large companies, some that invest in only bonds. So um just take an average of all of them is not really an accurate way to say it. It's just the you know, you're just picking the flavor or the style that you want. But I think that what rocket dollar represents is the ability to for people to have more control over what they want to do with their money. And then of course, you know, if you lend it to the wrong person for a hard money loan and it goes defunct, that's on you. But but you know, you're discovering and finding things that you're more comfortable with. So your audience, uh, after eight seasons, it's the D Wonderful Real Estate uh podcast. And you know, there's a lot of people who listen to you who realize that, hey, I'm much more comfortable investing in the things I know, the things I can go see, the areas I'm comfortable with, versus let's say blindly putting money into a mutual fund concentrated in large United States company stocks, which right now are largely concentrated from a return standpoint in the largest technology ones. And although I may see a couple of Teslas driving around on the road, I don't really have any sway in what that company may do. Uh I've heard of this company NVIDIA, but I don't know what they do because I'm not in tech. Um and so forth. But but people our customers tend to like the just like the the more control that they have, like the ability to control their own monies that they already have to go into investments that they feel more comfortable with. Um that that's I think what we represent at rocket dollar.

Dwan Bent-Twyford 26:14

Yeah, no, I I really love it. I mean, you're obviously you are actually the first person in the entire uh eight years of my podcast that I've interviewed that that does this, uh, you know, rocket dollar, first of all, and that I've talked to that actually has a fund that is more, like you said, like real estate, more kind of based like that, opposed to the average, whatever everybody does. And of course, you know, I interview people all the time that have syndications. There's a million of those too. And I like the idea, like if I had my money in there, I would like the idea of being able to do various things with the money. Because at this point, people already have the money in there. So it's not like they're coming in and saying, okay, here's my hundred dollars. What can I do? They're already in, they've got some money, and they uh obviously hopefully have gained some knowledge or they've been following me for the last eight years and they know everything about real estate investing, and they can take that money and they can do things with it.

Henry Yoshida 27:06

Exactly. And you know, I own I own a condo in my uh you know, rocket dollar account. So I own private investments. Uh, you know, I'm invested in a couple of companies. I own um a real estate. I just listed it for uh rent right now, actually, uh January 15th. So five days ago. Nice listing one live, yeah.

Dwan Bent-Twyford 27:23

Nice for a property that I own inside of an IRA. I have a bunch of uh students that started off as just students, wholesaling houses, flipping houses, rehabbing, and then they made a lot of money, and then they uh, you know, bought some of their IRA, put the money back in, and now they're hard money lenders and they're lending from their IRS, and they're just like, I can't believe I learned how to do this from you. Yeah, I'm making so much money, and you know, they're just like making so much more because they're lending the money out of their uh IRS. But I know this one sounds like it's an easy way to do it.

Speaker 27:58

We so we are an easier way. Um, you know, when I started the company, so my company prior to Rocket Dollar was another technology platform. It was acquired by a Wall Street firm. And when I created when I started Rocket Dollar, the the thinking here was how do I make it as easy to open an IRA as it is with these traditional incumbent providers? Like in other words, trying to put myself in the position of the customer and thinking, what are the expectations here? So the expectations are, and we've we've achieved this, but that you can go to rocketdollar.com and you can open an account in seven screens and eight clicks in less than three minutes, uh, provided you know your address and your full legal name and so forth. Uh you know, some people you know maybe a little slow on those kinds of things. But um but if you can do that, you you open an account right away. And then once you have that account open, you have the ability to digitally begin a transfer of some monies in your IRA account at Fidelity, or you have an old 401k from a job that you left in 2020, but you were there for eight years. So you know that there's about a quarter million dollars in that account or $100,000 in that account, and it's just there, and you haven't worked at that company now in five and a half years, but you move that over to the Rockefeller account, and when it gets here, it's your IRA money, and you could go provide a $100,000 hard money loan at a 14% interest rate to a developer who you've worked with in the past, who you know has had like every deal go great for them, that they're gonna be good to pay you back. Um this is a 14-month term, 14% annualized interest. And again, if you're doing it inside of your IRA, this is not taxable money. So your real return is beyond 14% 14%, depending on what your tax rate is. And that and that's kind of a nice ecosystem because this actually kind of takes maybe that bank channel out of the equation, is helping that developer get their project done and then helping the investor client customer of Rocket Dollar actually get closer towards their retirement goals. And that's kind of the that synergistic uh circle.

Why Big Institutions Go Private

Dwan Bent-Twyford 29:57

Oh no, I love it. I think it's great. So I'm gonna we're gonna switch topics for a minute. I always like to talk to people a little bit and like get to know you personally. So tell me, what is your favorite band of all time?

Henry Yoshida 30:09

Uh my favorite band of all time. So I I kind of think about this. So it's kind of nuts, but given my age, so I really liked um I grew up, I'm about to turn 49 here in a couple months. So I think for me, I really like those bands back from like the 90s and 80s, like that Depeche Mode style. So that music kind of went away. Um uh and it was a little bit before that sort of 90s grunge, which oddly enough is what my 15-year-old daughter is into now. It's like 90s Nirvana Green Day.

Dwan Bent-Twyford 30:40

Oh, I know. I know I love Nirvana and Green Day. I I'm such a big Green Day fan, it's crazy. So we're going with Depeche Mode.

Henry Yoshida 30:48

Yeah, I'll do that then.

Dwan Bent-Twyford 30:50

I know that's a fun band. You know, I I always tell I I well, I like to ask people like, you know, what they do, what do they eat, what do they listen to? Because you can just tell a lot about a person from their music, their genre, how they were raised, what they've got, what they like. And I always find, Henry, and I'm sure you'll agree, is that people want to work with people that they like and they have things in common with. And someone's gonna hear this today and go, oh man, I love that kind of music he loves. And you know, I love all that. I love that. Um, let me go check this guy out. So what's your what's your favorite food?

Henry Yoshida 31:25

So my favorite food, um, yeah, I I answered this differently. I always think to myself that if I could only eat one meal for the rest of my life, you know, on repeat, and just if I had to, what would I eat? So it'd probably just be uh uh top sirloin steak and fried eggs because I figure that I could survive for 50 years if that was the only thing I could eat for the rest of my life.

Dwan Bent-Twyford 31:45

It's true.

Henry Yoshida 31:46

And I eat a lot of that now.

Dwan Bent-Twyford 31:47

So yeah, I'm actually uh I started on the carnivore diet um in December. I have an autoimmune and I started having a bunch of flare-ups and a bunch of stuff. And some people that have autoimmune diseases were saying, hey, sometimes do like the carnivore, it gets rid of the sugar and the carbs and gets a lot of things out of your system, helps with inflammation. And I'm telling you, I can't believe how much better I'd feel eating like that. And then of course plus sides I lost 15 pounds, which I was not doing it to try to lose weight, which for real, because you know, women are like, I'm going on diets. Like, no, I just want to try to feel a little bit better. But those couple of weeks when you first start off and you're like really like steak and eggs, meet, meet, meet, meet, meat and stuff, you go through the whole withdrawals of the sugar and the carbs, and you feel like you got the flu, and and you're just like, it's terrible what it does to your body, all that stuff.

Henry Yoshida 32:39

Yeah, well, it's just uh, you know, I think you're more getting on the just eliminating things that are processed and like uh what is it? If if if everyone in the country, right, and they just recently flipped that food pyramid upside down to change it. But if 90% of the food you ate had three ingredients or less, you'd probably be a lot healthier and save a lot of medical bills.

Dwan Bent-Twyford 32:57

So yes. So I'm I'm eating a a lot of steak and eggs and hamburger and eggs and so much salmon and stuff, and it's just like I I feel a lot better getting all that crap out of me. I don't know. Anything sweet or sugary, I'm having nothing. No car, nothing. It's like it is amazing. So um so I'm gonna ask you uh two more questions. So one at the end, because we'll see, oh we're out with our time, yeah. So at the um end of every show, I always like to ask my guests to leave us with one uh a word of wisdom, but I just want a single word, like one single word.

Henry Yoshida 33:37

Curiosity.

Dwan Bent-Twyford 33:38

Okay, now don't say anything yet. Curiosity. Okay, so curiosity is so what we do in the Dwanderful World is I tell everybody every week when you hear my guests, they're gonna give us the word of the week, and they're gonna put on a little sticky and you're gonna put it up there. And every time you brush your teeth, you're gonna be saying curiosity, and you're washing your face. Curiosity, that's our word for the week for everybody. So now that we know what the word is, what does curiosity mean to you?

Control, Diversification, And Risk

Henry Yoshida 34:06

Just don't accept things at surface level. You know, if people tell you something, you got to try to learn the context or learn what's behind it. So uh again, we just mentioned that hey, if you eat steak and eggs, you know, you you might get rid of inflammation. But you know, the the curious part is that you gotta kind of find out why. Um, or in my case with my business, right? It's that I've done well accumulating monies in a regular 401k in the stock market. Why would I diversify away and open a rocket dollar account and buy real estate? Well, um, you know, then you'll start going down this path of maybe learning about diversification, or that although the stock market on average has gone up by eight to ten percent a year for the last 90 years, uh there have been periods where in a single year it'll go down 20 to 35 percent.

Dwan Bent-Twyford 34:52

Oh, yeah.

Henry Yoshida 34:53

And that happens every fifth year.

Dwan Bent-Twyford 34:56

And so I you know, the thing is I really like that word because I feel like a lot of people are not curious enough, just in life in general, to go out and learn new things and have new experiences and try a new food or travel to a new place or invest in something different because people are so locked into I have to do this for this many years and retire and work for the man and da-da-da-da-da. And I feel like people have kind of lost that like childlike curiosity that we all had when we were younger.

Henry Yoshida 35:26

Yeah, exactly. And and it's kind of weird because we're in a position now with technology to where we can find the answer to everything, but we know less. Uh, we can talk to anyone in the world, but we're less social.

Dwan Bent-Twyford 35:37

I know, and that's crazy. It is so crazy. Okay, one last thing. So, people that have listened, they like this, they're like, hey, I really like this guy. I like the rocket doll, I like all that. What is the very first step somebody would take to take action with you? What's the first thing that somebody needs to do?

Henry Yoshida 35:55

So, first thing that they would need to do is probably begin to identify is there some sort of private or non-public investment opportunity that they like? And if that is the case, uh then it might be going to our website and explore opening an account or talking to one of our folks. Uh, one of the things we have, although it's 2026, is that we have a phone number on the top right-hand uh side of our homepage website, and we answer that phone basically during business hours uh Monday through Friday. And it's not a sales line, it's just an information line if you have questions about how these accounts work and so forth. This is a new concept to people, but it's existed for 51 and a half years. Um and so we're happy to answer questions about that and and just help folks get comfortable and help them understand that probably investing in alternative and private investments like real estate in an IRA seems unusual today, the way that owning an individual stock might have seemed unusual in the year 2000.

Dwan Bent-Twyford 36:55

Yeah.

Henry Yoshida 36:56

And now a lot of people own an individual stock.

Dwan Bent-Twyford 36:58

Yeah, no, I love it. And the thing I love is that you have someone that can talk because, you know, so I'm 66 right now, and when I want information, I mean, I'll Google, I'll do all the things. If I was gonna come over to Rocket Dollar and I had questions, I would actually want to talk to a person and not be in a chat room, a stupid chat box. Like, just let me talk to a person so I can ask my three or four questions like directly and I can move on to the next thing.

Speaker 37:25

A chat box that you know is not a real person because it's a good thing. Oh, they drive me crazy.

Dwan Bent-Twyford 37:28

Yeah, like you don't want to know. And they give you 15 choices. I'm like, listen, just give me a freaking person. Yeah, just want to ask some questions. I don't want to go through this 80, I don't want to figure it out. So ask the question so I can move on.

Henry Yoshida 37:40

So you want to know something funny? So we have we've had people call or line recently, and uh, you know, one of our folks will answer, like a Tristan Keaton will answer, and one of them was telling me that the person actually was uh saying uh accused him of being an AI. So he said, Can you prove that you're not an AI like answer person? Uh and he said, Uh I don't know how to do that. And he said, Okay, you're you're a real person because AI wouldn't have said, uh that's so great.

Dwan Bent-Twyford 38:09

I know. A I love AI, but you know, I don't know.

Henry Yoshida 38:12

I I just feel like you just said, people But they expected it to be a robot that actually answered the phone.

Dwan Bent-Twyford 38:17

So I've had people call me before and after a couple questions, I'm like, are you a person or am I talking to that? No, no, no, I'm a person. It's like, oh, oh my god.

Henry Yoshida 38:24

Okay, so it does happen. All right.

Dwan Bent-Twyford 38:26

See, people do like that. Okay, so everyone, I want you to go to rocketdollar.com. Uh, Henry, this has been super informational and it's been super fun. I like your music, I like your food, like what you do. I like the fact that it's really good for real estate investors. So, all of you out there, this is a great way to grow your money. You take the money out, you invest it in something, and then the money and the profits, and it all keeps going back in, and you can really grow your wealth a lot if you're using the right kind of an R A IRE. And I feel like this is the answer that a lot of you have been looking for. So I'm really excited to promote what you're doing because I feel like you feel you feel a need for all the millions of investors around the country that want to do something that's not like this. They want something different.

Henry Yoshida 39:13

Right, exactly.

Dwan Bent-Twyford 39:14

You fill a big hole that we need.

Making It Easy: Opening And Funding Accounts

Henry Yoshida 39:16

Well, hopefully, you know, a lot of your listeners, they probably have a lot of monies accumulated in these accounts and they just assume they can't use it. So um, you know, if nothing else, I go on to a show like this and it it just opens the eyes that maybe there's a pool of capital that that the average everyday American has access to that they didn't think they could use for investments into things like real estate. They thought that they could only keep it at this brokerage house and invest in these mutual funds or public stocks only.

Dwan Bent-Twyford 39:42

They do think that I have so many new investors that even like when they want to pay for like my mentoring, they're like, oh, I can pay for that with an IRA. I'm like, yeah, you can use that money for all kinds of stuff. And a lot of people just, you know, just you know, regular run-of-the-mill, they don't know that they can invest and do things like you just said. So this is a way to really grow your wealth and and and keep away uh those Uncle Sam taxes for as long as possible.

Henry Yoshida 40:07

Exactly. That's right.

Dwan Bent-Twyford 40:09

Okay, everybody. So thank you so much for being here. If y'all had fun, if you listened, if you learned anything, I want you to do me a favor, subscribe, leave a five-star review, keep sharing, help me crack two million downloads. We're like this close. And I can't do it without you. So we'll be back next week. Same bat time, same bat channel. And remember that the truth is in the red letters. All right, everybody, thank you. Goodbye, have a good week. Mr. Henry, thank you so much. You are just a darling.

Henry Yoshida 40:39

Thank you.