Let's talk about bond ladders in this the 31st episode of the Retirement Planning Education Podcast.

Welcome to the Retirement Planning Education Podcast, where you can learn all about IRAs and Roth IRAs, employer retirement plans, taxes, social security, Medicare, portfolio withdrawal strategies, annuities, estate planning,

and much more. And now here's your host, Andy Panko.

Hello, everybody. Welcome back. Thank you as always for listening. Today we are going to talk

about bond ladders. I like ladders. I'm a handy guy. I have a few different ladders. My favorite of which is a little giant ladder. I don't know if anyone has one of these. Bear with me as I digress. But it's quite cool. It's this ladder where it kind of folds up and you can open it and then it extends and locks. So you can make it like different lengths.

You can use it like an A-frame ladder.

You can extend it like an extension ladder.

It's really cool.

I've had one for like 15 years and actually keep it outside in the elements like a dope as opposed to my shed.

But the thing has never rusted, never locked up.

Still functions flawlessly.

It was like 400 bucks, I think,

at the time when I got it. I don't know what they are now. I think they're still sold.

Anyway, but that's my ladder. That's the kind of ladder you can use to clean the gutters or,

I don't know, get a frisbee out of the tree. That's not the kind of ladder we're talking about today. We were talking about bond ladders. I believe the reason why,

which you'll find out, why bond ladders are called ladders is because of the concept of having

rungs. Like visualize a ladder, you know, laid out with a few different rungs. With a bond ladder,

each rung represents a point in time where you have a certain amount of money

invested in bonds typically, historically, but there's a few different options you can use to

build these rungs, which we'll discuss. Each rung is a certain maturity of a pot of money

at a different point in time. So you can have one rung that's some

money that's freed up or maturing in one year, another rung in two years, another wrong in three

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