Contract had my name on it, the wire took nine days, and the deal died

I'm about four weeks behind you on this exact path and my agent has already drafted a contract with my name on it once. I caught it because of a post here, not because I knew anything.

The inspection detail is the one I hadn't thought about at all. I assumed due diligence costs were mine to pay because I'm the one deciding.

The vesting problem is the most common failure in first SDIRA purchases and it's entirely preventable at the offer stage. The buyer on the purchase contract has to be the custodian for the benefit of the account, in the exact format that custodian uses. Ask them for their vesting string in writing and paste it into the offer. They differ, and a close-but-wrong version gets kicked back, which is what cost you a cycle.

On due diligence costs: expenses connected to an asset the IRA is acquiring should be paid from the IRA, using whatever expense authorization form the custodian requires. That includes earnest money, inspections, and appraisals. Build the time for those forms into your diligence schedule, because each one is a separate submission and each one carries its own processing window.

Whether personally paid costs on a purchase that never closed created an issue depends on facts, and you did the right thing paying a professional to look rather than deciding yourself. That question is not answerable from the outside.

On timelines, custodian processing is the binding constraint on almost every all-cash IRA purchase. Get the quoted turnaround per document type in writing before you write an offer, and negotiate contract dates against that number with meaningful padding. Sellers accept longer closes for cash more often than people assume, and the alternative is what happened here.

One structural point: an all-cash purchase has no financing contingency, so earnest money protection has to come from the inspection or title contingency periods instead. Confirm that language with the attorney who reviews your contract in your state, because deposit forfeiture rules vary.

Nine days against a stated five is the number I'd hammer on. That's not a bad custodian necessarily, it's just what the business is, and everyone I've talked to says the same thing about the gap.

What I've started doing before I even shortlist: call three custodians and ask for turnaround per document type in writing. Two sent it. One said it varies, which told me plenty.

Sorry about the $3,200. Cheap tuition compared to funding a purchase into a contract in your own name and finding out afterward.