If you're a Millennial, who would like some help investing, look no further. Our simple, quick guide is going to tell you everything you need to know about where you should be putting your money.
Municipal Bond
You don't have to know much about investing to know that bonds are a very, very safe bet. Yet, they can still provide extremely good returns over the long term. That' one of the reasons most experts are quick to recommend we all add bonds to our portfolios.
Municipal bonds are especially easy to recommend. Sadly, a lot of people think they're only for those who are already rich or at the age of retirement. This leads them to make a massive investment mistake by ignoring the opportunity to put money into such a sound and reliable resource.
Millennials are a great example of this. They're in an ideal position to fully benefit from municipal bonds. If you're in your early 20s or 30s, you can focus on high-yield returns through the well-balanced municipal bond portfolio.
They offer a higher return than most other types of bonds, will stabilize the volatility of your other investments and will provide you with a consistent flow of investment income.
The Efficacy of Bond Ladders
One really smart way to get the most from municipal bonds is to actually use a bond ladder. Put simply; this is a portfolio of bonds that regularly mature (usually every year or every two years) across a specific maturity range.
As a bond matures, the principal gets reinvested into the ladder on a "rung" with the longest maturity. By doing this over and over, the strategy produces a fairly reliable stream of income. Using municipal bonds for this makes it even more reliable and great for capital preservation and tax efficiency.
Best of all, in a rising rate environment like we're in right now, returns can be reinvested at much larger amounts.
Rates Will Rise This Year
Make no mistake about it, either; interest rates are going to rise in 2016. The Federal Reserve recently announced they would be hiking them up at least twice though they most likely won't start until June at the earliest.
This creates fertile ground for using municipal bond ladders to their full advantage. The truth, though, is that even if interest rates hardly budge at all, the yield an investor would receive from their ladder could still go up anyway over time.
That's the beauty of this system and, again, why it works out so well for Millennials. Start now and you don't need too many market forces working to your advantage in order for municipal bonds to pay off in a big way.
When you consider how influential Millennials are-they represent the largest element of our labor force, for one-you understand why it's so important that they invest well. Their spending power is important to the future of our country. With a municipal bond ladder, they stand a real chance of getting the returns they need to live comfortably and grow the economy for decades to come.