Welcome to the Stay Wealthy podcast. I'm your host Taylor Schulte, and today I'm wrapping up our four-part series on investing in bonds by talking about implementation. My goal today is simply to help you take action, to take what you've learned these last four weeks and make some meaningful improvements

to your retirement portfolio. So if you're finally able to wrap your head around the basics

of bond market investing and you're ready to go and take action, today's episode is for you.

For all the links and resources mentioned, head over to you staywealthy.com forward slash 88.

Okay, so to kick things off, I'm going to share some performance numbers from what many are now referring to as the COVID crash of 2020. And the crash began on February 19th of this

year and it bottomed out on March 23rd, so a little more than a one-month

drawdown. During that time frame, the S&P 500 ETF, the SPY, it fell 34%. And in case you're

wondering, developed international stocks fell roughly the same amount. And while most of the attention was on the stock market, much of the bond market was also going

for a bit of a wild ride during that same time frame.

For example, the investment grade corporate bond ETF LQD, it dropped 12.5%.

The I shares national municipal bond ETF,-UB, it was down 10%. And the I-Share's

high-yield corporate bond ETF, as you might expect, after learning more about the credit premium,

this ETF was down just over 22% during the same time frame.

I wanted to revisit these numbers to help kind of summarize and bring us home and share how I think about bond investing.

The most common thing that I'm hearing about the bond market is something along the lines of,

you know, with interest rates so low, real returns on bonds going forward could be negative. Why would

I invest in an asset class with low or negative expected returns? So first, I want to bring

you back to the very first episode of this series where I mentioned that, yes, the bond market

is complex, but the great thing about bonds is that some basic math often allows

you to pretty accurately predict the future of your bond investment. In fact, several years ago,

Vanguard founder John Bogle concluded that the best predictor of future bond returns is today's

current yield.

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