Interest is free of state taxes. They renew automatically. There isn't anything safer.

https://treasurydirect.gov/

I've been watching youtube gurus ... quality, dividend yielding commodity or oil stocks. Copper. In a crash, dividend growth/appreciation/achiever ETFs and funds because they are the equivalent of throwing the baby out with the bath water. The rich love crashes because quality gets beaten down too. They buy great assets that will rebound and beat inflation, and they buy them on the cheap. Generation after generation. That's why they get rich and we never make progress.

On edit: Oh, I answered the wrong question again. You asked about stashing. Private credit has permeated all but bank deposits and Treasuries, and even some banks have private credit exposure. So yes, the stash place is CD's, Treasuries IMHO.

hide your cash in the poop draw*


*=For MAGA lurkers: place money under plastic bag liner to keep poop off your money.

Why not ask them? They should have investment professionals that will act as a fiduciary for your interests and will provide you with a number of options based upon your goals, income and current wealth/holdings. If not, find a professional (brokerage, wealth manager, etc) in your area that you can talk to.

A million times better than asking folks on the internet.

And if you're close to retirement, the targeted blended funds your 401K is in are hedged to mitigate risk. Those target funds for year of retirement that most 401Ks offer change over time and protect you from most down turns.

You invest for the long term, now is not the time to panic. People who panicked during Covid and tried to time the market missed out on massive gains. Timing the market is nearly impossible because you have to be right not once, but twice. There are super computers using AI that won't time the market right, your prospects are basically a roll of the dice.

That being said, HYSAs have outperformed the DOW since Trump was inaugurated. I don't hear them bragging about 50,000 anymore. And I think they'll blame this correction of Bear Market on the war, but we have had an entire year of basically no net new jobs created, an absolute catastrophic period for jobs in this country.

It's going to be a bumpy ride, but I implore people do not get caught trying to time a volatile market. A Dem will come in and save the economy eventually, we always do.

If you left the market in 1/20/25, you have missed significant gains, and your cash holdings have decreased in value due to inflation.

Hire a competent financial advisor and invest in a balanced diversified portfolio.

Our portfolio has weathered the crashes of 1987, 2001, 2008, and COVID and gone on to make significant gains and serve as an important source of our current retirement income.

The impact of Trump’s second term on the markets is nowhere near the losses of those crashes mentioned above- it’s not even as bad as the major drop last spring.

With Trump you must expect volatility, including inflation.

The rest of our savings were blown away in medical catastrophes, in spite of having good health insurance. That was in the days of aptly named COBRA plans and subsequent uninsurability.

Fortunately we were able to keep our home by the slimmest of margins (we were days from foreclosure) and settle our medical debts for pennies on the dollar (not really, insurance had already paid out insane amounts of money) and home prices here in our region of California have doubled or tripled since then.

When we can no longer support our home I imagine we'll sell it and move in with whoever will take us. That's the generational pattern in my family, probably going back to our arrival in America.

If nobody wants to take me in (I can be a pain to live with, especially when I'm off my meds and even when I'm not) so I suppose I might end up homeless too. It wouldn't be the first time and that was probably my expectation for how I'd end up when I was at my worst in my late teens and early twenties. Unfortunately I may no longer have the physical ability and mental acuity for the rougher sorts of life ten or twenty years from now. Nevertheless I don't want to be a burden on anyone.

Maybe this nation will get it's act together by then and rebuild itself as a truly civilized nation that makes sure nobody goes hungry, homeless or without basic medical care, but it's hard to be optimistic so long as the Nazi... ahem... Republican Party exists.

I can't imagine how much discussions like this must anger people who are struggling to live on meager pensions or paycheck-to-paycheck with few or no assets.

We're probably lucky we could no longer borrow money from reputable lenders when things were most dire. Borrowing money from disreputable lenders might have left us in a hole we couldn't climb out of. The vultures were circling... we were getting those checks in the mail for loans with 30% interest. If I recall correctly the largest was for $90,000. Accepting that offer would have inevitably led to the loss of our home and us living on the streets. Even so, our mortgage was sold to a company that was eager to "help" us, but they were actually betting against us, their actual business being foreclosures.

There are many posters here on DU who are living close to the edge and a few who have actually fallen off the edge. We're not among them.

If things truly turn to shit in the U.S.A. I'll probably be shot mouthing off to an ICE agent or something.

How soon do you need the money you want to invest? If soon, you could look at short-term CDs or money-market fund. Longer-term, you might consider a global bond fund until the economy/markets stabilize (after PEDOnald is gone), then maybe get back into equities.

If you don't want to take the risk of stocks, you could park money in a short- or medium-duration bond fund, meaning a duration of less than five years. To get a better idea what I mean, look up the definition of "duration"--it's more complicated than I want to explain here.