Unless, you have buckets of cash stuffed inside your mattress, you should finance. 

She had a outlet in the back bedroom of her three-bedroom house short and caught the mattress on fire.  

For individual units, the cap rate isn't too bad at around 2-5%, especially considering the appreciation, but I feel like I have money stuffed under the mattress with the large amounts of equity I have built up in them.My end game is to leave Beijing and move to the SW U.S. when I retire from my current career within the next 5 years. 

Record every wall, ceiling, floor, front and back of doors, shades opened and closed, window screens, yard from every angle, home exterior from every angle, mattresses (uncovered), etc.

Can't hide your rental unit under your mattress, or deposit it in an offshore account.

It certainly beats the crap out of working an additionl 40 hrs/week to gain overtime salary.Maybe it's more like this-- it's better ROI to put your cash in a money market account than keep it under your mattress; but it's better to put it into an index fund than a money market; better still to select a prize-winning stock; better still to correctly pick hedge funds/explosive growth companies, etc., etc.

Some things like mattresses I ordered online, some items I got from the Habitat store and some from the local stores there.I semi-lived in the property during a lot of the renovation.

It's like buying a mattress - if you dont know anything about it, you are getting screwed over. i hate dealing with tenants about the carpet during their move out process....installed a new carpet last year. now they are moving out and the carpet is stained (not spills, but like they never took their shoes off). most likely it was a cheap carpet, but what do i know?

And still manage to lose out to homeowners with (mattress money)as we like to call it here.

I can't blame people for not trusting banks and essentially stashing their money under a mattress.