How to acquire assets without buying them?
Assets can be acquired in different ways and for different purposes. I will only address common legal ways of acquiring assets. You can trade one asset for another asset. This usually takes place in the form of trading cash or a cash equivalent for an asset. The asset received should be of equal or greater value than the asset given in the eyes of the purchaser in order for the trade to be rational. Take this example: I am selling a bike that has been sitting on my porch for a few months. It's worth about $25 to me. My friend, Andy, comes by and offers $90 for it. I happily accept. Andy valued the bike at $110. This transaction produced value for both parties. I had a value benefit of $65 (90 - 25) and Andy had a value benefit of $20 (110 - 90). You can receive an asset as a gift or an inheritance. Less common, but still frequent. Someone gives you a gift or a family member dies and you receive an asset you did not own previously. You can receive an asset in exchange for a liability. When you take out a loan, you receive an asset (cash) which is financed by a liability (loan payable). In your case: Why would I buy a mall if having assets worth the same amount as the mall? I must value the mall more than the assets I currently have. This may stem from the possibility of greater future returns than I am currently making on my asset, or, if I financed the purchase with a liability, greater future returns than the cost associated with payment on the principal and interest of the liability. Your question seems to be premised on your personal understanding of economics, and asking that people present to you an explanation of business transactions that is consistent with your own personal worldview. But your premises are flawed, so an accurate answer should not accept them. The basics of trade is that something is worth more to one person than another; a wheat farmer has more wheat that they could possibly eat, and so it has no value other than what they can get by selling it, while an accountant will starve if they do not have any food and thus is willing to pay what the market demands. The two parties can both be better off by having a transaction. The other motivation for transactions is that parties may disagree as to what something is worth; even if one party will lose from the transaction, they may both believe they will profit. You don't start out buying a shopping mall, you have to work up to it.  You can start with any amount and work up to a larger amount. For me, I saved 30% of my salary(net), investing in stocks for 8 years.  It was tough to live on less, but I had a goal to buy passive income.  I put down this money to buy 3 houses, putting 35% down and maintaining enough cash to make 5 years of payments.  I rented out the houses making a cap of 15%.  The cap is the net payment per year / cost of the property, where the net accounts for taxes and repairs.  I did not spend any of the profits, but I did start saving less salary.  After 5 years of appreciation, mortgage payments and rental profit, I sold one house to get a loan for a convenience store.  Buildings go on the market all the time, it takes 14 years to directly recoup an investment at a 7% cap, which is the average for a commercial property sale.  Many people cash out for this reason, it's slow, but steady growth, though the earnings on property appreciation is a nice bonus.  Owning real estate is a long term game, after a long time of earning, you can reinvest, but it comes with the risk of bad or no tenants. You can start both slower and smaller, just make sure you're picking up assets, not liabilities.  Like investing in cars is generally bad unless you are sure it will appreciate. There are a number of ways someone acquires assets without buying it. People could have inherited assets. They could have been gifted assets. They might have won assets in a lawsuit (unlikely to be a mall, but not impossible). They could have married into the assets. So there's other ways of acquiring assets without purchasing them.
First, if it is in any way a joint account, the debt usually goes to the surviving person. Assets in joint accounts usually have their own instructions on how to disperse the assets; for example, full joint bank accounts usually immediately go to the other name on the account and never become part of the estate. Non-cash assets will likely need to be converted to cash and a fair market valuation shown to the probate court, unless the debts can be paid without using them and they can be transferred to next of kin. If, after that, the deceased has any assets at all, there is usually (varies by state) a legally defined order in which debtor types must be paid. This is handled by probating the estate. There is a period during which you publish a death notice and then wait for debt claims and bills to arrive. Then pay as many as possible based on the priority, and inform the others the holder is deceased and the estate is empty. This sometimes needs to be approved by a judge if the assets are less than the debts. Then disperse remaining assets to next of kin. If there are no assets held by just the deceased, as you get bills you just send a certified copy of the death certificate, tell them there is no estate, then forget about them. A lawyer can really help in determining which need to be paid and to work through probate, which is not simple or cheap. But also note that you can negotiate and sometimes get them to accept less, if there are assets. When my mother died, the doctors treating her zeroed her accounts; the hospitals accepted a much reduced total, but the credit cards wanted 100%. "I debated whether to put this in an answer or a comment, because I'm not sure that this can be answered usefully without a lot more information, which actually would then probably make it a candidate for closing as ""too localized"". At the very least we would need to know where (which jurisdiction) she is located in. So, speaking in a generic way, the options available as I see them are: Contact the mortgage companies and explain she can't continue to make payments. They will likely foreclose on the properties and if she still ends up owing money after that (if you are in the US this also depends on whether you are in a ""non-recourse"" state) then she could be declared bankrupt. This is rather the ""nuclear option"" and definitely not something to be undertaken lightly, but would at least wipe the slate clean and give her some degree of certainty about her situation. Look very carefully at the portfolio of properties and get some proper valuations done on them (depending on where she is located this may be free). Also do a careful analysis of the property sales and rental markets, to see whether property prices / rental rates are going up or down. Then decide on an individual basis whether each property is better kept or sold. You may be able to get discounts on fees if you sell multiple properties in one transaction. This option would require some cold hard analysis and decision making without letting yourselves get emotionally invested in the situation (difficult, I know). Depending on how long she has had the properties for and how she came to own them, it MIGHT be an option to pursue action against whoever advised her to acquire them. Clearly a large portfolio of decaying rental properties is not a suitable investment for a relatively elderly lady and if she only came by them relatively recently, on advice from an investment consultant or similar, you might have some redress there.  Another option: could she live in one of the properties herself to reduce costs? If she owns her own home as well then she could sell that, live in the one of the rentals and use the money saved to finance the sale of the other rentals. Aside from these thoughts, one final piece of advice: don't get your own finances tangled up in hers (so don't take out a mortgage against your own property, for example). Obviously if you have the leeway to help her out of your budget then that is great, but I would restrict that to doing things like paying for grocery shopping or whatever. If she is heading for bankruptcy or other financial difficulties, it won't help if you are entangled too." You can set up a Self Managed Super Fund (SMSF) and use it to buy residential investment property, and as Justin has mentioned even borrow to acquire the investment property through the SMSF.  However, you cannot hold your home in the SMSF, as this would be classed as an in-house asset, and you are only allowed to hold a maximum of 5% of the total market value of SMSF as in-house assets. Furthermore, as you already own your house, you are not allowed to transfer residential property into a SMSF from a related party, even if done at current market value (you are allowed to transfer business real property from a related party at current market value). Regarding loans, you are not allowed to lend money from your SMSF to a related party as well. "I don't think the advice to take lots more risk when young makes so much sense. The additional returns from loading up on stocks are overblown; and the rocky road from owning 75-100% stocks will almost certainly mess you up and make you lose money. Everyone thinks they're different, but none of us are. One big advantage of stocks over bonds is tax efficiency only if you buy index funds and don't ever sell them. But this does not matter in a retirement account, and outside a retirement account you can use tax-exempt bonds. Stocks have higher returns in theory but to have a reasonable guarantee of higher returns from them, you need around a 30-year horizon. That is a long, long time. Psychologically, a 60/40 stocks/bonds portfolio, or something with similar risk mixing in a few more alternative assets like Swenson's, is SO MUCH better. With 100% stocks you can spend 10 or 15 years saving money and your investment returns may get you nowhere. Think what that does to your motivation to save. (And how much you save is way more important than what you invest in.) The same doesn't happen with a balanced portfolio. With a balanced portfolio you get reasonably steady progress. You can still have a down year, but you're a lot less likely to have a down decade or even a down few years. You save steadily and your balance goes up fairly steadily. The way humans really work, this is so important. For the same kind of reason, I think it's great to buy one fund that has both stocks and bonds in there. This forces you to view the thing as a whole instead of wrongly looking at the individual asset class ""buckets."" And it also means rebalancing will happen automatically, without having to remember to do it, which you won't. Or if you remember you won't do it when you should, because stocks are doing so well, or some other rationalization. Speaking of rebalancing, that's where a lot of the steady, predictable returns come from if you have a nice balanced portfolio. You can make money over time even if both asset classes end up going nowhere, as long as they bounce around somewhat independently, so you'll buy low and sell high when you rebalance. To me the ideal is an all-in-one fund that aims for about 60/40 stocks/bonds level of risk, somewhat more diversified than stocks/bonds is great (international stock, commodities, high yield, REIT, etc.). You can just buy that at age 20 and keep it until you retire. In beautiful ideal-world economic theory, buy 90% stocks when young. Real world with human brain involved: I love balanced funds. The steady gains are such a mental win. The ""target retirement"" funds are not a bad option, but if you buy the matching year for your age, I personally wish they had less in stocks. If you want to read more on the ""equity premium"" (how much more you make from owning stocks) here are a couple of posts on it from a blog I like: Update: I wrote this up more comprehensively on my blog," I think a greater problem would be the protection of your property right.  China hasn't shown much respect for the property rights of its own citizens - moving people off subsistence farms in order to build high-rise apartments - so I'm not certain that a foreigner could expect much protection.  A first consideration in any asset purchase should always be consideration of the strength of local property law.  By all accounts, China fails. "Am I wrong?  Yes. The exchanges are most definitely not ""good ole boys clubs"". They provide a service (a huge, liquid and very fast market), and they want to be paid for it. Additionally, since direct participants in their system can cause serious and expensive disruptions, they allow only organizations that know what they're doing and can pay for any damages the cause. Is there a way to invest without an intermediary? Certainly, but if you have to ask this question, it's the last thing you should do. Typically such offers are only superior to people who have large investments sums and know what they're doing - as an inexperienced investor, chances are that you'll end up losing everything to some fraudster. Honestly, large exchanges have become so cheap (e.g. XETRA costs 2.52 EUR + 0.0504% per trade) that if you're actually investing, then exchange fees are completely irrelevant. The only exception may be if you want to use a dollar-cost averaging strategy and don't have a lot of cash every month - fixed fees can be significant then. Many banks offer investments plans that cover this case." How does one buy this quantity of TIPS? Do you simply buy directly from the US Treasury? You will might have to go through a financial institution like a broker or a bank. Edit: You can also buy bonds directly with TreasuryDirect. Is it cheaper to buy a fund that invests in TIPS? It might be cheaper depending on the fund  itself. But you can't know for sure the price that the fund will be worth at you payout date. Since bonds can go up in value (and are likely to with rates this low), is there a way to measure potential downside? Statistically speaking yes. You can look at the variation in price/interest of the bonds in the last years, to see how they usually move, then compute the price range where they are likely to be (that can be wide for volatile securities). But there is no guarantee that there won't be some black swan event that will make the price shoot up/down. In another word, it's speculation Can I mitigate downside risk by choosing different TIPS maturity? There are quantitative strategies to do that, like finding that some products that are negatively correlated, such that a loss in one is be hedged by a gain in another. However those correlation are likely to be just statistics. And for every product that you buy you are likely to have to pay some fees for your bank/broker which can be more devastating than the inflation itself. Is there some other strategy I should be considering to protect my cash against inflation (or maybe a mixed strategy)? As I wrote above, trying to use complex financial products can incurs loss and will have fees (both for buying and selling). Is it really necessary to hedge from a 2% inflation by taking such risk? Personally, I don't think so. If I were you I would just be buying bonds maturing for your payout date. That would negate the reselling risk and reduce the fees. "Maybe a bit off topic, but I suggest reading ""Rich Dad Poor Dad"" by Robert Kiyosaki. An investment is something that puts money to your pocket. If your properties don't put money to your pocket (and this seems to be the case), then they're not an investment. Instead, they drain money from you pocket. Therefore you should instead turn these ""investments"" into real investments. Make everything to earn some money using them, not to earn money somewhere else to cover the loses they create. If that's not possible, get rid of them and find something that ""puts money into your pocket""."