[morgaine300]

Been too long since anyone's posted in this forum, so I thought I'd wake y'all up.

I've pretty much worked out what I'm currently doing with my long-term goal money. So now I'm trying to work on some 3-5 and 5-10 year stuff. Right now it's all in CD's. (I'm going to miss those 5% rates when they mature. :( ) I am fairly risk tolerant, and I like funds since the managers know a whole heck of a lot more than I do.

For 5-10 year I don't have any issue putting more into a conservative allocation fund I have. There are times when it's down of course (like now), but once it approaches the 3-5 year mark, I still have plenty of leeway to sell at a reasonably good time and move it. But there might be other things to do with it. And there's also that 3-5 year money.

I've been wanting to look into bond, treasury bills, market market & such like funds. But this is a new area for me. I can figure out present values of bonds all day, but that's just math and I really don't know much of anything about them.

Excuse me while I blabber for a bit. Last time I looked at bond funds, at least the lower risk ones, my CD's were doing better. But not anymore. But do bonds play "catch up"? i.e. will their returns start dropping also? Or just short-term ones? I've also noticed that money market funds used to be worse than my CD's, and again, not anymore. And again, will those play catch-up and drop too? The one thing I don't like about CD's is having to deal with maturity dates, so except for really short-term money, it'd be nice to avoid that. Oh, and are most bond funds in it for the interest itself? (versus gains)

Yeah, I'm risk tolerant, but this is not long-term money, so I have to work within that context. I know my own risk, as long as I have the information. So for instance, is there a such thing as fairly risk free bonds? For example, I saw a Dodge & Cox fund that was intermediate, 80% AAA, 95% A+, and return rates fairly consistent over 10 years at just over 4%. That consistency appealed to me. Would something like that be appropriate for 3-5 year?

Risk-wise, how do different types of bonds compare to say large cap domestic stocks, or to CD's? If I have some type of comparison, I might be able to go from there on my own, or at least ask more intelligent questions. Also, are there specific things that would be bad to buy now?

Oh, I was going to try to keep this simple, but I never know how. (Simple would be to take my 5-10 year money & stick it into a target 2015 fund. But that wouldn't be any fun.) :D

Any info would help. And I don't care if anyone jumps in 3 months from now cause I might still be trying to figure this out. LOL.