I went in to buy a Prius cash, but Toyota was offering 0% interest loans to buy a Prius, so I invested my money and paid monthly payments. I am done, I have the title today. Now I start double mortgage payments. I can't 'save' at 4.75%, but I can reduce my home loan. The most I can find in short term 'savings' is 1.21% Short Term Investment Options In GE Capital | GE Interest Plus
but 5 years from now, you might wish you still had that 4.75% mortgage. although, you can get 3.5 -4.25 these days.
GE short term bonds. Takes about a week to add or remove money, but there is no 'term' I need to leave it in. It is uninsured, if GE goes under, I am out of luck. Short Term Investment Options In GE Capital | GE Interest Plus I can set up a recurring payment, just like I was making car payments.
As you near the end of your loan the interstate is minimal. I don't get the argument of having a payment? Cash is king.
I would have offered to pay cash for the car in return for a lower purchase price. But maybe you did, and they said no. You can get in the 4% to 7% range in some corporate bonds. Vanguard Long-Term Investment Grade fund is currently paying 4.84%, and their High-Yield corporate bond fund is paying 6.52%, but those latter bonds are below investment grade. Individual bond issues have the added risk of too many eggs in one basket, while bond funds reduce the risk by spreading your money over many issues.
My spouse was adverse even to 3 month CDs, she did not want any 'term'. We compromised by $2000 in Passbook savings and all the rest in GE Bonds. I can get them back to checking in 7 days. She is not unhappy, which makes me happy. (I am paid Quarterly, while she gets 1/2 her annual salary in December, so we have a trickier time living 'paycheck to paycheck' than some one with a consistent income)
The interest you'd get on a 3 month CD is too little to even bother counting. A CD today is just a safer way of stuffing money into the mattress. Unfortunately for savers (but fortunately for borrowers) interest rates are so low nowadays that there's no safe way to get money for your money. Either you put it in the bank or mattress and it sits there doing nothing in relative safety, or you invest it with a greater or lesser degree of risk. OTOH, there are some good returns to be had for what I regard as acceptable risk for a certain part of my money, while most sits in what I hope are safe investments. If my "safe" investments fail, it's probably along with a general economic collapse which would render the alternatives useless. (The end-of-the-world crown think that when armageddon comes, gold will have value. But you can't eat gold. The only things that will have value then are food, the means to produce food, and weapons that can be used to steal or protect food.) So I'm not worried because in that case nothing I could do now would save me. I don't know enough about GE to have an opinion, but I suppose it's probably one of the safer ways to earn a measly 1.2%. That means a thousand dollars will earn you twelve dollars at the end of a year.
i was in cd's and treasuries when they were paying 8%. life was good. now, if i want to retire, i have to figure out how to make 3-5% just to make ends meet. it's not that i don't trust wall street, i just don't like being a co conspirator.
