You might be interested in a book by Diane Kennedy titled The Insider’s Guide to Tax-Free Real Estate: Retire Rich Using Your IRA. It is not true that one must buy property outright and it must be at least half a mil. There are nonrecourse loans. One can buy with someone else. It could be a vacant land or a condo rather than a mansion. If you are interested in finding out more contact sreese@mtrustcompany.com.

Like it or not, humans are social, hierarchical animals.

IN GENERAL – there are always exceptions – financial resources are used for signaling in dating and mate selection.

It is no accident that low-income men have low marriage rates; women IN GENERAL have financial standards below which men are considered “umnarriageable”.

An American woman would scoff at a suitor who sought to impress her with the claim that by world standards he is actually quite rich.

A “poor” woman is much more likely than a “poor” man to find a mate, and it is no solace to a “poor” man to hear that he is really rich.

In terms of being poor, how about that: I came to the US 30 years ago from the Soviet Union with exactly $128. My parents were in their 40s and couldn’t speak English – try learning English and finding a job in the US when you are over 40. We survived. Didn’t go hungry either as many of the poor in other countries do.

Meg is right about comparing poor in America with poor in other countries. My PhD-in-engineering cousin in St Petersburg, Russia, for example, earns $500 a month working two jobs – for one government lab during the week and for another lab in the evenings and on weekends. Sure, she owns a small one bedroom apartment that she shares with her mother, but everything else is expensive. Food there is a little cheaper than in the US, but not that much cheaper. Maybe about half for some items, about the same for others. But she doesn’t consider herself poor either. She is way better off than a typical retiree there, who is getting less than $100 a month in pension – barely enough to cover living expenses for 10 days. Those who could afford saving some money while they worked lost most of their savings in a couple of “currency reforms” in the 90s. And this is more than some poor people in other countries have.

By government standards, I am not poor; a childless adult working full time for minimum wage is above the poverty line.

On the other hand, a retiree owning a home with no mortgage, and living on a small Social Security check can be defined as poor, although the retiree might have a $500K net worth and has more money to spend after housing than I do.

And not that it matters, but I will point out that both of my parents and all four of my grandparents grew up in poverty. Not at “the poverty line” as it’s defined today, but literally getting clothes from the church and struggling to get fed from time to time. When I was little, in fact, we lived in “the ghetto” in an urban city in AL. Even today I know many “poor” people personally; I even have a few extended family members who earn “less than a living wage.”

My family’s current relative wealth has nothing to do with the statistics that show that “the poor” in America today have lifestyles and standards of living that vastly exceed what anyone would define as poor anywhere else in the world. And that if the typical “poor” person actually worked 40 hours a week (as opposed to around 20) that they would no longer be legally “poor.”

I read an IRA book which, as I recall, said there is a catch: to put real estate in an IRA, the property must be bought outright from the IRA.

In other words, if you want to buy a $500K property, your IRa must have $500K with which to buy the property, and you can’t finance the property with a smaller down payment and a mortgage.

(I love reading PF books; I find a perverse satisfaction in proving how PF-educated I am and how useless a lot of this information is to the poor.)