My IRA has 31k sitting in one note and I cannot tell if I should wait for it to pay off before deploying the next tranche or start sourcing the second deal now

The sourcing-calendar question is real, and the tension you're describing is not a flaw in your thinking. It's structural: your deployment window is short, your sourcing lead time is long, and you only have one slot active at a time.

The way most people with a single-note book handle this is to start sourcing roughly six to eight weeks before maturity, with the explicit expectation that they will tell sponsors they are "funded in February." Some sponsors will hold a spot, most will not, and you already know that from last month. So the sourcing activity is not wasted even when a deal walks. You are building relationships with originators and getting a read on what the market is offering, which shortens the next cycle.

The idle-capital cost you're naming is real. Three months at, say, 9 percent annualized on $31,000 is roughly $700 in foregone interest. That is not catastrophic but it adds up across multiple cycles.

One thing worth knowing: some SDIRA holders keep a small cash buffer in the account specifically to fund a bridge position, a short 60 or 90 day note, while waiting for the main maturity. That requires having more than one position's worth of capital in the account, which you said you don't, so it's not available to you right now. But it's the mechanism people use to solve exactly this problem over time as the account grows.

On whether to fish the same pond as your personal account, that's worth its own thread because the prohibited-transaction rules add a layer your personal account doesn't have.

What kind of notes are you sourcing, first position, second, by deal type? That would help me say something more useful about the sourcing calendar question.

The assumption doing the most work here is that a deal you find but cannot fund immediately is a wasted sourcing effort. That is not always true, but it depends on sponsor behavior, which varies a lot.

Some sponsors running smaller Spokane-market notes will hold a position for a relationship they trust, particularly if you are transparent about your timeline upfront. You found one last month that was gone before you could act. The question is whether you disclosed your February constraint to that sponsor early, or whether you were still in due diligence when it closed. If the latter, the fix is earlier disclosure, not earlier sourcing. Sponsors who will not hold even two to three weeks for a committed IRA buyer are usually running oversubscribed deals or one-time relationships, and that tells you something about fit.

The structural problem you actually have is a single-note book with no staggered maturities. That creates a recurring dead-money window every time a note pays off, and the six-to-ten week sourcing-to-funded cycle means that window is almost always going to exist at your current deal size. The answer to that over time is getting the book to two or three notes with offset maturities, so you are sourcing continuously against a predictable calendar rather than scrambling after each payoff. With $31k as the full liquid balance you cannot do that yet, but it is worth thinking about whether the February payoff gets redeployed as one note or split into smaller positions.

On Spokane specifically, and the personal-account overlap question, that is worth its own thread because the conflict-of-interest framing inside a prohibited-transaction analysis is something a tax professional who works with SDIRAs should weigh in on before you fish the same pond aggressively with both accounts.

What was the note term on the one you found last month, and did you have a direct relationship with that sponsor before they listed it?