Somewhere in a filing cabinet or an old login, a lot of business owners have a retirement account from a job they left years ago. It sits in a handful of mutual funds. It goes up, it goes down, and the owner, who might flip houses or lend money or run a business they understand cold, has no way to point any of that money at the thing they actually know.

Here is the part almost nobody gets told: it does not have to be that way.

A self-directed retirement account follows the same IRS contribution rules and the same tax treatment as any other IRA or 401(k). The difference is the menu. Instead of stocks, bonds, and funds only, a self-directed account can hold real estate, private notes, private companies, precious metals, and more, in the areas where you have an edge.

Take one example that comes up again and again: a rental property owned inside an IRA. The account buys the property. The rent flows back into the account. Repairs and taxes get paid from the account. Done correctly, the growth happens inside the retirement wrapper, with the tax treatment intact.

Now, correctly is doing a lot of work in that sentence, and this is where the training earns its ninety minutes. There are guardrails: rules about who can use the property, how the money has to flow, and a few assets an account simply cannot hold. There is a difference between a Solo 401(k), a SEP, and a Roth that changes how much you can put in and when you pay tax. And there are advanced corners, debt-financed income and active-business income, where a self-directed account can actually owe tax if you are not paying attention.

This month, I'm handing the Inner Circle session to a specialist who lives in this world. Austin Leagjeld from Mountain West IRA, an independent self-directed account administrator that has been at this since 2006, is walking us through the whole picture: the account types, the 2026 contribution numbers, the assets you can and cannot hold, the guardrails that keep it compliant, and a couple of real client stories showing how a deal actually flows.

It is education, not advice, and that is the point. You will leave understanding your options well enough to ask your own advisor the right questions.

If you have an old account that could be doing more, come find out what "more" could look like.

Join us at this month's Inner Circle training. Details and replay inside.