Paid off my 0% interest loan.

Yay!

 

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.

 

i know, but i'd rather have a low interest mortgage and write off when interest rates go up!

 

In what did you invest?

 

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 am sitting at Fixed 3.875%, 5 years to go!
WooHoo!

 

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.

 

cash is king. if you pay off your mortgage, who has the cash?

 

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.