Welcome to money for the rest of us. This is the personal finance show on money, how it works, how to invest it, and how to live without worrying about it.

I'm your host David Stein today is episode 464. It's titled

More Ways to Lock In Case Interest Rates Fall.

We're currently doing a listener survey for listeners of money for the rest of us and we ask listeners what they want to hear about.

And one of the leading suggestions is to do more multi-part series over several episodes that take a deeper dive into a particular topic.

That's what this episode is.

We discussed a number of ways to lock in higher yields in last week's episode.

We want to continue that discussion in this week's episode and share some additional ways

that we can lock in higher yields.

Now why would we want to do that?

One of the questions we got from one of our plus members

is, well, if we think interest rates are going to fall,

then why don't we just purchase a longer-term

bond fund or E.T.F and benefit from the price appreciation if interest rates do

fall. The reason is we're not sure they're going to fall and we want to

protect ourselves in case interest rates rise. In last week's episode we

reviewed the three primary drivers that determine interest rates.

The first is the expectation for future short-term interest rates, and that's tied to the

Central Bank policy rate in the U.S. that the Fed's fund rate.

As investors believe a Central Bank will be lowering its policy rate in the future that can

put downward pressure on interest rates.

The second driver was inflation expectations.

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