What to Look for (and What Not To) in a Self-Directed IRA Administration Firm

What to Look for (and What Not To) in a Self-Directed IRA Administration Firm

If you’re thinking about opening a Self-Directed IRA for the first time, there’s a good chance you’ve thought about meeting with an IRA administration firm. After all, you know that a custodian you can trust is integral for making the Self-Directed IRA arrangement work. But what should you look for when you are looking for a home for your account? After all, it’s not exactly like buying a new car, when you know what you want out of the experience and have had experiences driving different cars. No. Instead, working with a Self-Directed IRA administration firm can be an entirely new experience. You’ll need to know both what to look for and what to avoid if you’re going to find the right one.

Payment Structure in a Self-Directed IRA Administration Firm

When you save for retirement, fees are a key concept. The more you pay in fees, the more those fees will eat into the magic of compounding returns. And that’s not a good thing, because it means that some of the hard-earned money you put into retirement won’t end up in your own pocket. One of the best things to look for is the style of fees that an administration firm applies. At American IRA, we don’t work on a sliding scale of fees.

Instead, we offer a flat rate annual administration fee. Even as your assets expand and grow, you’ll still pay the same fees. A lot of other providers will either charge you per asset held by the account or will charge you a percentage of the account itself. At American IRA, we feel that since you are the one actually making the investments, we shouldn’t be the ones to profit off of your work.

Trustworthiness

Working with a Self-Directed IRA administration firm means that you’re choosing someone who’s going to walk a long journey with you. Hopefully, they’ll walk the entire road with you on your journey to retirement. This means that you need to place a great deal of emphasis on trust. The only question is, how do you determine whether you can trust a Self-Directed IRA administration firm?

We often consider how someone from the outside might look at American IRA to gauge us. And there are a few variables. First, there are the people who work with us. You can check out our team and see their experience in the fields of IRAs and more. You can also review the testimonials of satisfied clients right here at our website. This should give you a sense of the kind of experiences we’re helping people achieve. We also take great pride in our A+ Better Business Bureau rating and our 4.7-star Google review rating.

Experience

Finally, you’ll want to know what a Self-Directed IRA administration firm brings to the table in terms of experience. You can evaluate some of this by checking out the leadership team already present within an IRA administration firm. For example, our team has decades of combined experience in working with Self-Directed IRAs and working with happy clients. We’ve also built a firm that has a lot of direct experience over the years in delivering exactly what we say we’ll deliver: an outstanding relationship with the retirement investors with whom we work.

If you know these variables, you can know what’s important to find in a Self-Directed IRA administration firm. But you should also have a sense of what might throw you off. For example, if fees increase for you as your assets build within a portfolio, that’s a sign that you may want to continue researching Self-Directed IRA administration firms.

Interested in learning more about Self-Directed IRAs?  Contact American IRA, LLC at 866-7500-IRA (472) for a free consultation.  Download our free guides or visit us online at www.AmericanIRA.com.