My bond journey has likely been a common one I am guessing but want to get some feedback on how I'm viewing them now and going forward.
At the start of my professional career and thus savings journey, I put everything into 401K mutual fund options and pretty much in various growth funds. I essentially just "set it and forget it" back then bumping up my savings % as quickly as I could until I was at the max limits and things stayed that way for tax deferred savings for a long time.
In my 40's I started thinking more about retirement getting closer (working in the tech field will do that as many know) and I started learning more and more about investing and the importance of fees, lazy portfolios, etc. etc. and have learned so much over the years thanks to this forum and other sources.
The one thing I haven't been as good about is fully understanding bonds and bond funds until the last year. 2022 taught me how this was a mistake and now thanks mostly to the fine people who post here, I feel that I really understand the differences between individual bonds, bond funds and related fixed income options.
So here's my thinking... I'm about to retire in the next two months and I'll need to guard against SORR as I'll have a little over 10 years before I plan to file for SS at 70. Given the current rate environment I've implemented a ladder approach using a combination of brokered CDs and target maturity bond ETFs (iShares iBonds) as well. The plan is to leverage these both to fund as much of the bridge years as possible leaving most of the equity investments alone in case of a downturn in the early years. BTW - I understand the tradeoffs with the target maturity ETFs but felt the diversification and inexperience with individual bonds made these a good choice (for me, for now).
Apologies for the super long post but I am just looking for opinions on what I've chosen for guarding against SORR.
At the start of my professional career and thus savings journey, I put everything into 401K mutual fund options and pretty much in various growth funds. I essentially just "set it and forget it" back then bumping up my savings % as quickly as I could until I was at the max limits and things stayed that way for tax deferred savings for a long time.
In my 40's I started thinking more about retirement getting closer (working in the tech field will do that as many know) and I started learning more and more about investing and the importance of fees, lazy portfolios, etc. etc. and have learned so much over the years thanks to this forum and other sources.
The one thing I haven't been as good about is fully understanding bonds and bond funds until the last year. 2022 taught me how this was a mistake and now thanks mostly to the fine people who post here, I feel that I really understand the differences between individual bonds, bond funds and related fixed income options.
So here's my thinking... I'm about to retire in the next two months and I'll need to guard against SORR as I'll have a little over 10 years before I plan to file for SS at 70. Given the current rate environment I've implemented a ladder approach using a combination of brokered CDs and target maturity bond ETFs (iShares iBonds) as well. The plan is to leverage these both to fund as much of the bridge years as possible leaving most of the equity investments alone in case of a downturn in the early years. BTW - I understand the tradeoffs with the target maturity ETFs but felt the diversification and inexperience with individual bonds made these a good choice (for me, for now).
Apologies for the super long post but I am just looking for opinions on what I've chosen for guarding against SORR.