Bond Investing Master Class - How to Invest in Fixed Income
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Welcome to Money for the Rest of Us. This is a personal finance show on money, how it works, how to invest it, and how to live without worrying about it. I'm your host, David Stein. Today's episode 418. We're having a bond investing masterclass.

Bonds, also known as fixed income, are one of my favorite asset classes. As an institutional investment advisor, I thoroughly enjoyed the research trips I took visiting bond managers like PIMCO, Western Asset Management, and others. I spent over 15 years researching fixed income strategies and managers, as well as explaining how bonds and bond management works to my institutional clients.

I managed institutional portfolios where fixed income and bonds were a huge component of our decision process and the value we added. For the past nine years, I've had the opportunity to teach about fixed income investing on this podcast and in our membership community, Money for the Rest of Us Plus.

This past year, there's been a big pickup in the questions we get about bonds. Now that interest rates are the highest they have been in over a decade. Consequently, we thought it would be helpful to revisit the principles of bond investing to help you make better, more confident decisions when it comes to using bonds in your portfolio. Hopefully, this will be a resource you can go back to

Let's get started then. First, what are bonds? Bonds, which are also known as fixed income, are debt instruments issued by governments, corporations, and other entities to raise money for new projects or ongoing operations. Bonds are essentially loans that investors make to these entities. An investor can purchase newly issued bonds

such as through Treasury Direct if you're a U.S. citizen. Treasury Direct sells government bonds at auction to individual investors and, I suppose, some corporations. Or as an investor, you can buy bonds that are already outstanding, that have been issued already, buy them in the secondary market through your brokerage account.

There are several key definitions or components when it comes to bonds, and we'll go through five key things you need to know about bonds just in terms of definitions and what they mean. The first is the face value. It's also known as the par value. This is the principle, the original amount borrowed for each bond. This face value or par value is the amount the bond issuer will pay when the bond matures. Each bond has...

has a set maturity date when the bond matures or is redeemed. And as a bond investor, you'll get that principal back. A typical bond has a face value of $1,000.

A second key element of bonds is the coupon rate. The coupon rate represents the interest rate used to calculate the periodic interest payment. The interest payment is calculated by multiplying the coupon rate by the face value of the bond. Most bonds pay interest semi-annually.

A third key component of bonds is the yield to maturity. The yield to maturity is the estimate of the bond's total return if it is held to maturity. Now, some bonds can be redeemed early. It's called being called under certain conditions based on what interest rates have done. And so there's another yield statistic that you might sometimes see called a yield to worst. And that's basically the yield to maturity assuming the bond is

is called early. Now, the yield to maturity is important because when you buy a bond, it's rare that the yield to maturity equals the coupon rate. And the reason for that is interest rates fluctuate. So you might buy a bond that has a 4% coupon rate, but you bought it in the

let's say you bought that bond three years ago and interest rates were a lot lower, your yield to maturity will be less than the coupon rate of the bond, what's stated in the bond indenture. Essentially, the contract, this is the interest rate on the bond. This is what the interest payment is.

But your yield to maturity would be lower if interest rates have fallen. And the reason why your yield to maturity is lower is because you actually paid more than the face value or par value for the bonds. Because as interest rates go down, the price of bonds go up. And when interest rates rise, price of bonds go down. Why do bond prices fluctuate as interest rates change? One reason I like bonds is they're based on math.

So mathematically, investors need to be indifferent between buying a bond that's been outstanding, that is trading in the secondary market, versus buying a newly issued bond. If it's the same issuer, let's say the U.S. government, and the same maturity. So let's say there's a bond that was originally a 30-year bond, but it's been outstanding for 20 years. So now there's 10 years to maturity. This is a 10-year government bond.

and its coupon rate is 2%. So it pays $20 interest annually for each $1,000 of face value. But let's suppose that prevailing interest rates are 3% for a 10-year government bond. So if U.S. Treasury issues a new 10-year Treasury bond at 3%, but the coupon rate on the 30-year bond

that has 10 years left until it matures is 2%, then the price of that 2% bond with the 2% coupon rate needs to fall. Otherwise, investors wouldn't be indifferent between buying the older bond versus the newer bond. They'd all go out and rush out and buy the newer bond. And because there would be more demand for the newer bond, then the older bond would fall in price. And in fact, it does. And that's where it becomes mathematically equivalent.

that older bond would fall to a level that that $20 of interest received annually divided by the new price equals 3%. So the yield to maturity would be 3% for that older bond, and the newer bond would be issued at a 3% coupon rate. So it's yield to maturity, at least when it was first issued.

auctioned off would be the 3% yield to maturity. That way, all 10-year treasury bonds outstanding would have the same yield to maturity even though they have different coupon rates and investors would be economically indifferent between the various bonds, in this case, 10-year bonds outstanding. A fourth key component then is duration. There is a mathematical relationship between how sensitive a bond price is to changes in interest rates.

We've seen why bond prices fluctuate with interest rates, and we want to know how sensitive a given bond is or a bond fund is to changes in these interest rates. And this is somewhat of a complicated calculation. It's based on the weighted average cash flow of the bond interest estimates.

and principal payments, but we can simplify it with this rule of thumb. A one percentage point increase or decrease in interest rates will cause an individual bond, bond fund, or bond ETF to fall or rise in price by roughly the amount of its duration. For example, if we own a bond ETF that has a six-year duration, if interest rates increase by one percentage point,

the bond ETF will fall in price by about 6%. And if interest rates fall 1%, the market price of that bond ETF would increase by 6%. The longer the duration, the more price sensitive the bond or bond fund is. Now, duration is calculated for individual bonds, but it's also calculated for bond mutual funds and ETFs, basically a weighted average.

We saw the impact of duration last year because interest rates rose. So a longer duration fund such as the ISHA's 20 plus year treasury bond ETF, the ticker is TLT, it has a duration of 17 years. Last year, its total return was

was negative 31%. If you look at 20-year interest rates, they went from 2.05% at the beginning of 2022 to 4.05% by the end. So with a 17-year duration, we had a two percentage point move in interest rates. That would equate to a negative 34% decline for that bond ETF. But the ETF is also getting...

Interest income, and so the overall loss was negative 31%.

Meanwhile, if we look at a shorter duration fund like the Vanguard short-term treasury ETF, the ticker is VCSH, it has a duration of about two years. In 2022, the ETF's total return was negative 3.9%. Still lost money, but did much better than the longer duration TLT ETF. If we look at as a proxy and average maturity for this fund, the bonds it holds would be about three years. Three

Three-year interest rates increased by three percentage points last year. They went from 1.04% to 4.2%. This fund has a duration of two years. So if we use our back-of-the-envelope calculation, a two-year duration fund, three percentage point change in interest rates would be three times two, or a negative 6%.

price decline for this ETF. But then it also earned interest income throughout the year, so its total return was negative 3.9%. So that's our fourth concept, how duration works.

A fifth component that we need to know as bond investors is the term convexity. The reality is a bond's duration doesn't stay fixed. The duration itself can change as interest rates change. So not only are prices of bonds fluctuating as interest rates change, but the underlying duration changes. Convexity measures how that duration changes as interest rates change.

Some bond duration gets longer as interest rates fall, and as interest rates go up, the duration gets shorter. An example would be a 30-year government bond, traditional bonds. We can

Consider that with the ETF TLT, which invests in government bonds with 20 years and longer in maturity. As interest rates have gone up, the duration of that bond fund has actually shortened. Now it's 17 years. Three or four years ago, it would have had a duration perhaps over 20 years because interest rates were lower. And so as interest rates go up for traditional bonds, the duration shortens.

Now, that's known as positive convexity. We can also have negative convexity, where durations get shorter as interest rates fall. And an example of this type of convexity is a mortgage-backed security. Mortgage-backed bonds are a type of bonds that's backed by home mortgages. And as interest rates fall, more homeowners want to refinance their houses.

and pay off the original mortgage. And so the holders of mortgage-backed securities are getting principal back earlier than what they expected because of all the refinancings. And because that cash flow is coming in sooner, the duration of those bonds is getting shorter. And so in this case, it's negative convexity because the duration itself gets shorter as interest

interest rates fall, whereas with a traditional bond that doesn't have that feature, for example, isn't callable early, as interest rates fall, the bond duration gets longer.

So now that we have these five elements, we want to use them. So we know what the face value or par value is, the principle is. We know about the coupon rate, the yield to maturity, the duration, and the convexity. We can use these elements to decide what maturity of bonds should we own. Should we invest in short-term bonds or long-term bonds?

Now, that question, the answer to that question depends on why we're owning bonds and what is our view regarding interest rates.

I primarily own bonds for the income. And if you primarily own bonds for the income, you might want to own longer-term bonds or a longer-term bond fund if longer-term interest rates are higher than shorter-term interest rates. And that was the case two or three years ago. But if the yield to maturity for shorter-term bonds is the same or higher than longer-term bonds, a situation we have today, then you might want to own shorter-term bonds

because you can get the same amount of income without the risk of capital losses or large capital losses if interest rates increase further from here. But what if you believe interest rates should fall in the future? That is, as the Federal Reserve, if they start reducing their policy rate and

And as inflation comes down, that that could lead longer-term interest rates to fall further. In that case, you might own longer-term bonds so you can profit from the price appreciation as interest rates fall. Now, it isn't an easy decision. It really depends on your

your view in why you own bonds. I tend to be an investor that just focuses on the income and interest rates would need to be much higher than short-term rates and much higher than average for me to be compelled or invited, motivated to buy longer-term bonds. The last time I owned long-term treasuries was the

in the 2010 period. So it's been over a decade. And there, we could buy a long-term bond and get a yield close to 5% and yields on cash were much less than that. And then interest rates fell, and I captured the price appreciation. I'll give some other examples later in this episode on trying to decide between longer-term and shorter-term bonds. But first, let's consider what investment vehicle to own.

Should we buy individual bonds? Should we buy a bond mutual fund or bond ETF? The advantage of buying individual bonds is we can estimate what the return will be irrespective of whether interest rates rise or fall if we hold the bond to maturity. By buying individual bonds, we don't have to worry about duration. We don't have to worry about convexity. We just buy the bond and hold it to maturity and

And our return should approximate the starting yield to maturity. So if we happen to buy a newly issued bond, we bought it at the face value, then the total return would be close to the coupon rate. So a 5% coupon, buy the bond for $1,000, our return would be close to 5%.

There is a big caveat, though. It assumes that the investor is reinvesting the interest payments into other bonds or other securities that are yielding 5%. And that's something we don't think about. Those interest rates rise, price of bonds fall, the yield to maturity changes. But a yield to maturity is a good estimate of what owning an individual bond will earn.

earn, but we have to recognize we're getting interest payments and those need to be reinvested. And the mathematics of yield to maturity assumes that interest income received is being invested at that same yield to maturity. If we're investing at lower yields to maturity, then potentially the return over a holding period won't equal the starting yield to maturity.

So just to review, if the price you pay for a bond is the face value, then the coupon rate should equal the yield to maturity. But if you're buying a bond in the secondary market, we should be very focused on what that yield to maturity is. The coupon rate, if we go to our online broker, we can see they'll say, here's the coupon rate.

that the interest payment is based on. But if interest rates have fallen, then the yield to maturity is going to be lower than the coupon rate, which means the price of the bond is going to be more than the face value. And so we can look at the individual bond, we can see the coupon, we can see the price, we can see the yield to maturity, and then another element that will be there on

on the online broker website is accrued interest. And accrued interest represents interest that the seller of the bond earned, but the buyer hasn't. It's calculated based on the last interest payment. So if you buy a bond through your broker, a bond in the secondary market, and it's been five months since the bond paid its last interest payment, you'll pay some accrued interest.

Because the next month, you're going to get a big interest payment based on a six-month holding period. But you'll receive that interest income, but you'll have paid five months of accrued interest that went to the seller of the bond. And that way, it all gets equalized. So people aren't earning interest on bonds they don't own, or they get interest income on bonds they sold, and they get that when they sell the bond. They get that accrued interest.

The primary advantage of owning individual bonds is the ability to estimate the total return and not have to worry about duration. And the estimate is the yield to maturity of the bond when it's purchased. Before we continue, let me pause and share some words from this week's sponsors.

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Another advantage of owning individual bonds is there's no management fee. There's not an expense ratio. You purchase the bond. Now, there's not even really a commission. I mean, there is a commission, but you don't ever see it because it's baked in to the price of the bond. And so you basically can see the yield to maturity. It's already taking into account any type of commission or profit that the bond seller, the broker has baked into the price. But

But there isn't an ongoing management fee because you're doing all the work deciding which of all the bonds to buy. And that's the disadvantage of owning individual bonds. It takes work to build out a diversified portfolio. And many of us don't have the skills to analyze more complicated bonds, such as lower credit quality corporate bonds that have higher risk of default or mortgage-backed securities like we talked about, which are basically bonds backed by home mortgages that have this prepayment risk if interest rates fall in negative convexity.

A bond mutual fund or a bond ETF is a convenient way to access the diversified pool of bonds. And the fees can be very inexpensive. Take the Vanguard short-term treasury ETF, VGSH, which we mentioned. Its expense ratio is only four basis points or 0.04%. A bond ETF such as VGSH generally seeks to match the performance of a target index. And there's not a whole lot of underlying trading of the bonds

that it holds. Most of the bonds, it'll just hold to maturity. But we could also buy an active bond mutual fund or bond ETF, where the manager is seeking to outperform a particular index. So they're adjusting the portfolio's duration or interest rate sensitivity. They could be adjusting the convexity, adjusting the sector allocation, moving into different sectors. And these bond funds have a higher expense ratio. And

And the only reason to use an active bond manager is they're doing work that we value. And that work could be credit research, could be a non-investment grade bond manager that's researching these higher risk bonds and trying to select those that won't default. Or it could be an active bond manager that is researching more complicated bond structures like mortgage-backed securities that are issued by banks, not by the government.

I have used both in my career, and I do now. Active bond funds, in my portfolio, I have some active bond funds. On Money for the Restless Plus, in the adaptive model portfolios, we have some active bond funds, but we also have some passive ETFs.

One of the challenges with most bond funds and ETFs is they don't mature. And as a result, investors in those funds or ETFs are subject to falling prices as interest rates go up.

If you buy an individual bond, yeah, the value of your bond could fall, but you just hold it to maturity and you recoup that. But consider that bond investor that's invested in TLT last year, the iShares 20-plus-year treasury bond ETF. They're down 31%. And if that investor sells, they're going to take a 31% loss. And so they need to be able to recoup...

those losses over time. And an ETF or a bond mutual fund, they're always reinvesting maturing bonds or as they've created new shares, they can invest those in higher yielding bonds. So over time, TLT will recoup that 31% decline through the interest income, assuming rates don't fall. So rates stay the same. Over time,

the higher income will allow that 31% loss to be recouped. But you have to hold the fund for seven years or more. A rule of thumb for a bond ETF or mutual fund is the best estimate of the total return for holding the fund is the starting yield to maturity if the fund is held for seven years or more.

So an investor that invested in TLT at the beginning of 2022, the starting yield to maturity would have been around 2%, but now it lost 31%. But the yield to maturity on the fund now is like 4%. So the fund is getting more interest income as it reinvests. And ultimately, let's say the yield to maturity stays at 4%, that 4% yield over time, you hold it for seven years, will be enough to offset that 4%.

so that the total holding period return will be 2%. Again, there's that caveat, though, as the investor is getting dividends from TLT, representing the interest income, that needs to be reinvested at that starting yield to maturity of at least 2% in order to basically get the 2% annualized return over that seven years. And that's really one of the challenges between individualized

Individual bonds, don't have to worry about the duration, just hold it to maturity. Bond funds and ETFs, duration can make a big difference in the return. But if we hold the fund or ETF for seven years or more, we will earn whatever that starting yield to maturity was when we invested, if we continue to receive and reinvest interest income at whatever that starting yield to maturity was.

Now, bond ETF firms have come up with a solution that sort of bridges the gap between owning individual bonds and a typical bond ETF. And this hybrid vehicle...

is known as bullet ETFs. These ETFs mature on a specific date in the future. The ETF owns bonds that mature about the same time the ETF matures. And because the ETF matures, it acts like an individual bond. You can buy it and whatever your starting yield of maturity is, that's a pretty good estimate of what the return for the fund will be if you hold it until it matures.

If we look at, for example, the iShares iBond December 2025 term treasury ETF. The ticker is IBTF.

Its SEC yield is 4.08%. And what an SEC yield is, it's basically the yield to maturity backing out the fund expense ratio. So it has a yield to maturity of 4.08%. If you bought that fund right now, held it until December 2025, your annualized return would be close to 4.08%.

Now, we could go out and just buy a treasury bond that matures in about three years. And if we look at prevailing rates, they're about the same as the yield to maturity on this bullet ETF. And so in this case, bullet ETFs for treasury securities, government bonds aren't as useful as they are for corporate bonds. We could buy the iShares iBond December 2025 ETF.

corporate ETF, tickers IBDQ. This ETF matures in December 2025, like the Treasury bond one did, but it owns 600, over 600 corporate bonds. It's a portfolio we couldn't replicate buying individual corporate bonds. So we're much more protected from default risk because it's diversified among over 600 bonds. Its SEC yield is about 4.9%. And

And this would be a good proxy. If you want to lock in an estimated return of 4.9%, then you would buy this bullet ETF and not have to worry about interest rates going up and down. In Plus Episode 378, we did a case study for a member that had bought one of these bullet ETFs. And the member was worried that he didn't get the return that he thought he was going to get. And we went through the analysis and when the

member bought the particular bullet ETF, it had a yield to maturity of 2%. And as we went through the math, we determined that no, his return was close to the starting yield to maturity.

As investors, then, we can decide between individual bonds, a bond fund or bond ETF, or these hybrid bullet ETFs. But we also want to consider, well, what type of bond fund or ETF? Let's say we just want to do the funds. We don't want to do a bullet ETF. We could own a broad-based bond ETF, so something that owns the entire bond market or tries to approximate the entire investment.

investment-grade bond markets, such as the Vanguard Total Bond Market ETF, ticker BND. We could use an active fund that's buying the broad bond market, but trying to add some value, some excess return above that. And the reality is for most bond funds, active bond funds don't outperform their index. There are some that do, and...

It's a challenge trying to identify that. So I tend to use active bond funds if there's an element that can't be replicated. So I might use an active bond fund like the DoubleLine Total Return Bond Fund that because of how they've structured the fund, it has a lower duration or interest rate sensitivity, but a higher yield than BND, the Vanguard Total Bond Market ETF. And so there's ways to use active bond funds if they have elements, yield,

and duration characteristics or credit quality characteristics than a passive option.

We could buy a sector fund. So that bullet ETF was invested in investment-grade corporate bonds. There are other actively managed investment-grade corporate bond funds that are doing credit research, trying to figure out not to invest in bonds at default. There are non-investment-grade bond funds. Right now, the yield on those are over 9%, but there's default risk. And so when we estimate expected returns on

on money for the rest of us plus we back out an estimate of the performance drag from the default risk.

on Money for the Restless Plus, each month we look at the yield on corporate bonds, on non-investment grade bonds, on mortgage-backed securities, and want to know what the incremental yield or spread is relative to government bonds. And when that spread is wider or higher than average, then that's a more attractive time to go into those particular segments. So right now I'm

the spread for investment-grade corporate bonds is around 1.5%. So we're getting around 1.5% more than comparable treasury bonds, and that average spread is only 1.1%, so it's a more attractive time to be invested in corporate bonds. We could also invest in municipal bonds. So municipal bonds are bonds that are exempt from federal income tax.

And if the bond is issued by your state of residence, it could be exempt from state income tax. And what we need to do with municipal bonds is always calculate the tax equivalent yield. The way you do that is we look at the yield to maturity or the SEC yield and divide it by one minus the tax rate. So if...

Your marginal tax rate is 35%. One minus 35% is 0.65, and we would divide 0.65 into whatever the yield is for the municipal bond. So if we look at 10-year municipal bonds right now, on average, they're yielding 2.23%. We divide that by 0.65, we get a tax equivalent yield of 3.3%.

If we compare that to 10-year Treasury bond yields, they're yielding 3.5%. And so based on that tax rate, it's better to own the government bonds versus the municipals. We can look at charts and we can see that based on the tax rate and based on the yield of municipals versus taxable bonds, whether it's beneficial to own municipals or not.

Other sectors of the bond market we can invest in is treasury inflation protection securities or inflation index bonds. Those bonds, their principles is adjusted based on the rate of inflation. And we have an investment guide. It's very comprehensive on the website that we'll link to in the show notes on how to invest in TIPS.

We can look at foreign bond funds. And again, we want to look at the yield to maturity, the duration, but there's also the currency risk. There are some foreign bond funds that are issued in your home currency, so you don't have to worry about the currency risk. Some emerging market bond funds, for example, are issued in U.S. dollars, so we don't have to worry about the currency, but we always want to compare if

If there's currency risk there, we want to make sure the yield by investing in that fund is more compelling than investing in your home market. Another thing to consider with bonds, and this gets a little tricky, is asset location. Where do we put these bonds? Do we put them in our taxable portfolio? Do we put them in our tax-deferred portfolio? And there's not a right answer here.

The general rule of thumb is for assets with higher returns, it's better that they go into the tax-free or tax-deferred portfolios because...

the taxes would be higher if they were in a taxable account. But it also depends on what the tax rate is. All things being equal, asset classes with higher tax rates, such as something that's generating a lot of cash, like a bond, is better off in a tax-deferred account because you're not getting taxed on that income. And so there isn't a right answer. Most investors have bonds in their taxable account and their tax-deferred accounts if

If they're a high net worth individual, they might invest in municipal bonds depending on their tax rate. So there's not an easy answer when it comes to that. All right, let me give an example. This is a plus member came up with this. And this kind of takes the principles that we've discussed. Let's say an investor has an option to buy a low duration bond fund. So its duration is two and a half years.

and it has a yield to maturity of 5%. That's kind of where we're at right now, more or less. Or there's the opportunity to buy an intermediate bond fund that has a yield to maturity or an SEC yield of 3.5% and a duration of six years. So the shorter-term bond fund has...

a higher yield than the longer-term bond fund that has longer durations, more interest rate sensitive. And if we care about income and we don't really have a view on interest rates, we would buy that shorter-term fund and collect the 5%. Now, in order to get that 5% return, we would need to be reinvesting the interest we receive at 5%, and possibly if interest rates fall, then we won't be able to achieve that. But if you don't want to take a view on interest rates, then you just take

the higher yield for the shorter-term fund. But let's suppose you expect interest rates to drop from 5% to 1% on the shorter-term fund, so a 4% decline, and you expect longer-term interest rates to fall by 1%. So that's going from 3.5% down to 2.5%.

In this case, is it better to buy the longer-term fund or the shorter-term fund? Now, it kind of depends on how quickly interest rates fall, but let's say it just happened immediately, that the Fed just decides we're going to cut short-term rates down to 1% at their next meeting. In that case, a two-and-a-half-year duration fund would see capital appreciation of 10%. So the 4% interest rate decline times the 2.5-year duration.

And the longer-term fund would see capital appreciation of 3.5%. So in that scenario, because shorter-term rates fell much more than longer-term rates, the owner of that shorter-term bond fund actually got the higher capital appreciation. In the meantime, is collecting, well, no longer getting the 5%. So now the yield's 1%. It's being reinvested at 1%. But still, over a seven-year holding period,

because of the 10 percentage point capital appreciation, at least the math that I was able to do. And I tried to find a bond calculator that would be able to do that, and I couldn't find one. I still think the shorter term fund is the better situation, but we'd have to go probably through much more detailed math. But because of the big, in this example, the big capital appreciation, even though we're now reinvesting at a lower yield, but then we could invest those interest rates. We don't have to just take the

the 1%. I mean, we could sell the fund and go buy a higher yielding longer term fund at that point. And that's why at least starting out, I would own the shorter term fund and then see what happens. Because again, the yield to maturity, the SEC yields higher than the longer duration fund. I'm just not willing to take the interest rate risk. Now, this brings up a lot of other questions that we've discussed on money for the rest of us. Like, well, if you have a bond where...

You have the capital appreciation. Is it now better to sell that and invest in other bonds? And I kind of went through an example of that on the site, which brings up one of the challenges with bonds. There's a lot more to say. It's ever-changing. We haven't really talked about bond ladders, something that we've talked about extensively on Money for the Restless Plus, particularly as members have bought treasury inflation protection securities now that yields on

on tips were over 1% for the first time in over a decade. We didn't really talk about bank loans or variable rate bonds or collateralized loan obligation. This was a masterclass to go over the basic principles of yield to maturities,

of duration, of confexity, deciding which investment vehicle, some back of the envelope calculations. If you want to get help with your ongoing bond management and the decision process as markets change, as interest rates change, then Plus Membership is the place for you. That's where we have these ongoing discussions. We discuss investment principles, tactical adjustments. It's really focusing on managing wealth, building wealth,

building wealth, keeping wealth. And part of that is knowing how to manage fixed income assets, which are part of most individuals' portfolios. If you want to learn more about Money for the Rest of Us Plus, please go to moneyfortherestofus.com. So that is our bond masterclass. Thanks for listening.

Everything I've shared with you in this episode has been for general education. I've not considered your specific risk situation. I've not provided investment advice. This is simply general education on money investing in the economy. Have a great week.