TIPS
TIANRONG INTERNET PROD SV
stock OTC

Nobody’s going to mention a TIPs ladder here? Ok I will:
They are a very good buy right now. This would only be for liability matching in retirement (not for accumulation). I have a small ladder that will get me to social security. Have a very small amount in a bond fund (through a 2070 target date fund I am using as an essentially permanent for me 90/10 allocation that will distribute exactly what I need to compliment my TIPS ladder until social security). The rest is in TBIL, ibonds, and VT. I was hesitant to add even this small allocation to a bond fund but I want full diversification and have a 30-40 year life expectancy left and am willing to bet a recession type event will occur during that time and the bond fund will helpful. I could be wrong but I sleep well at night with my set up.

Are we, the general population, as traders really looking at the market valuations and the basic metrics? Or are we just "following the heard" and blindly investing?
My old school take is to look at PE price earnings to be near 15 times.
It concerns me that broad market PE are North of 26 times and the CAPE is above 36 times.
Looking up the dot com bubble peaked at all time high of 43+.
This market is STUPID EXPENSIVE. I realize that you cannot let geopolitcal tensions (or ineptness) jade you. Nor do you let war or elections swade you. But logic says go the way of TIPS.
Bonds and gold are supposed to be safe havens. Yet with the new fed chair will he really wade through the data, find inflation is really high AND do an interest rate hike? If so, then the inverse relation to interest prime and bond prices has bonds looking unattractive.
Things that make you go, hmmm....
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Also TIPS

I don't know if it's been mentioned yet but tipswatch.com is another great site for TIPS and IBond info.

98% of my stock investment is ETFs, 2% in individual stocks. The individual stocks weren’t wise; their main purpose is to absorb the temptation to play with stocks. That’s half of my total investments; the other half is in TIPS (inflation indexed Treasury bonds) ladders. Because I’m old.

One alternative that I guess I should have mentioned are government ibonds, which apparently also are inflation adjusted but they don’t really fit your request for a simpler alternative as they have caps on the amount you can buy, they have strict rules about when you can redeem them, and you can only by them on the government website which I’ve heard is a major pain to deal with. I don’t know much about them, so I can’t really say much more. So MYGAs with their current higher rates than all other safe assets and the TIPS maturity ETFs with their current .10 ER are the only alternatives I can think of that can give you something safe and decent return, and individual TIPS still edge out ahead of those two.

Now is a good time to sell and diversify. Your capital gains should be near zero. There’s no completely safe investment. The closest I can think of would be TIPS, as they won’t be outpaced by inflation, but probably won’t make you rich either. VOO or VTI would be my recommendation. Shoring up your emergency fund isn’t a bad idea. 5 years is a tight timeframe for investing husband’s tuition. As you’ve mentioned, it could drop by 50% when you are close to needing it and not recover in time. HYSA or MMF might be better for those funds.

[https://www.ishares.com/us/strategies/bond-etfs/build-better-bond-ladders](https://www.ishares.com/us/strategies/bond-etfs/build-better-bond-ladders)
These are the ETFs in question. They behave just as individual bonds behave. Their underlying holdings are the TIPS that mature in the title of the fund. They buy them and hold them until maturity, then they close the fund.

The simpler alternative is the target maturity TIPS or Treasuries that OP mentioned they did for their first chunk of years.

Well now you have. Glad to be of service. I’m actually frequently surprised when new details about investing cross my path. The tipsladder.com thing I mentioned was one of those new details I ran across recently, which is part of the reason for my post. Knowledge about things like that can change the trajectory of a retirement plan. My 20 year TIPS ladder has definitely had big impact on my plan. I was able to calculate the opportunity cost pretty well and willingly accepted that cost.

How can an ETF have a fixed maturity date? ETFs have authorized participants that can redeem shares at any time. They might hold fixed-maturity bonds (TIPS or otherwise), but the fund itself fluctuates as interest rates do.

Actually that’s a separate issue. The parallel to your bond example would be a fund like VTIP, not the TIPS maturity ETFs I’m talking about. The ones I’m discussing mature in exactly the same way as individual TIPS. The true bond comparison would be with target maturity bond ETF series like the IBTx iShares and BSCx series with Invesco, where “x” is a letter that signifies the bond fund’s maturity date.

My happiness is positively correlated with security - it’s one of my top values/drives. Another way to put it is that worry driven by insecurity is the biggest dampener on happiness for me.
My lifestyle hasn’t changed as my net worth has grown (I’d say it pretty much stayed the same once I got to the $150k/year income mark - at that point it was really my savings rate that increased). Bought a very modest house in 2004 and lived in it for 22 years. Drove one vehicle between my wife and I for 10-15 years before getting a new vehicle and then did the same (Corolla -> Camry -> F150). Never paid to fly first class or business class, combined vacations with business trips to save money, etc.
We definitely enjoyed life once I had a real income and occasionally splurged on things, trips, concerts etc. - but the splurging never increased if that makes sense.
So, that being said - happiness never stopped increasing with net worth for me because I worried less and less. I used to worry all the time about being laid off, for example, once I had a 1 year emergency fund that worry almost completely went away. Once i realized that if I lost my job I could decide IF I want to go back to work it completely disappeared.
I retired this year at 57 with multiple buffers against worry (small annuity, TIPS ladder, spending flexibility, etc.) so that even doing 4% we can basically continue living the life we already worry without work stress.
If I’d kept working seeing the numbers grow would have made me continue to feel more secure but that has to be traded against the continuing work stress and lost time.

This isn't just about TIPS. Bond funds work very differently from directly holding bonds because with bonds you can always hold to maturity and not lose value to interest rates rising, while with a bond fund other people can sell their shares, causing you to realize losses even if you continue to hold.

That’s the thing: individual TIPS have no equivalent in the investing world. The ability to lock in purchase power protection no matter what inflation rate happens in the future is just not found anywhere in retail investing. Pensions are typically inflation adjusted streams of income but you can’t buy one on the open market, and income annuities used to have the COLA option but not anymore.
Total market funds trounce inflation long term but are useless if you’re trying to secure funds that you plan to spend in the next few years due to short term volatility as a constant threat.
A MYGA can give you a fixed rate of 5.5-6% currently covering that bridge period. That’s not inflation adjusted but it’s a solid rate. I own a MYGA at 6% for some of my fixed income allocation to cover spending beforeI start social security. Inflation could spike higher than that, but I’m okay with that risk.
Honestly though a three year TIPS ladder is super easy to create on that website I mentioned. And if you really don’t want to bother with that website, the ETF option isn’t all that bad. My post was really targeting people who care about perfect optimal efficiency when everything else is equal. The .10 expense ratio isn’t terrible, especially if you’re only wanting three years. That’s just the cost of convenience you’d pay for going on to your brokerage website and selecting the amount you want for each year of iShares iBonds TIPS maturity ETFs, with IBI being the first three letters of the ticker, and the last letter being different for each year of maturity. You could search by the maturity year and the iBonds TIPS maturity title.

What’s a reasonable alternative to a TIPS ladder for someone looking for more simplicity. I will be retiring at the end of 2026 at age 60. I currently have about 2 years of my expected expenses set aside in FZDXX money market. I am trying to figure out what I should do for the remaining 3 years before SS and a small pension kick in to minimize SORR.

It’s not something you need to worry about until you are ready to set up your retirement years and many Bogleheads stick with BND in retirement.
Once you retire, many people prefer to lock in money needed in the next few years and get inflation protection that you don’t get from the nominal bonds in BND. Some people buy individual bonds, some people buy TIPS funds with mixed durations and then in the last few years, Blackrock has introduced funds that you can buy a fixed maturity. They buy the bonds, distribute the income and then when they mature, they distribute the principal. The OP is discouraging people from using the Blackrock funds if it’s simply for fear of the process of buying individual bonds.

If you're looking for the safest option to hedge against inflation that'd likely be TIPS. Keep in mind the return directly scales with inflation, so if (US) inflation isn't very high the returns will be bad.

TIPS, real-estate, commodities, gold.
Pick one.

Are your investments in TIPS in taxable or retirement accounts.
For taxable, I always stayed away from direct TIPS because of the OID tax issue, the ETF absorbs this issue, making the .1 fee attractive. In retirement accounts, this doesn’t matter.