I'm hoping to get people's thoughts/ strategies about when to add bonds to an investment portfolio. I'm a 31 year old PhD student, married, and we are looking to retire in 20 years or so. Currently our pre-tax household income is around $80k (hopefully this will increase significantly when I finish my degree) and we are putting away about $30k annually.
Our current assets are $300k of stock indexes (around 80/20 US/International), $40k house fund in CDs, $36k E-fund (cash) and several series EE bonds, gifted to me by my grandparents over the course of my childhood, which will mature between 2019-2025 and total around $40k when redeemed.
So up to this point, I've had bonds in my portfolio; since they have 4% interest rates I figured I'd just hold them until maturity. My inclination is to invest the money in equities as they mature since I am still 20 years out from retirement. At the same time, many "rules of thumb" say hold to (age-10) or some other amount of bonds. Likewise 2040 target date funds seem to have around 15% bond funds.
Given my situation, would you buy bond funds with the money as I begin to redeem the EE bonds? Keep buying equities for now and start buying bonds later? Essentially, I'm looking for opinions on how many years out from retirement people are planning to add bonds to their portfolios.
Submitted January 21, 2019 at 11:45AM by HesterPrynn http://bit.ly/2sGqThj
