Cooking the Books podcast: How to use bonds as a safe place for your money

A few safe investments are a good part of almost any investment strategy. Photo / file

Each week the NZ Herald and Newstalk ZB's Cooking the Books podcast tackles a different money problem. Today, it's why all investments need a certain amount of safety, and how to organise that. Hosted by Frances Cook.

No matter where you're at in your investing journey, you need a mix of high and low-risk investments.

In a previous episode, I talked about the rule of 100 – the idea that if you take your age, subtract that from 100, what's left is the ideal percentage of high-risk investments you should have your money in.

That's because investing is always about time, and the more time you have, the more risk can help you make money while you sleep.

But that also means that we all need a certain amount of low-risk. Even if you're younger, and you're mostly going for wealth boosting options like shares, a little bit of low-risk investment rounds out your options to be better in the long term.

And if you're older, you might need quite a few low-risk investments.

Lower risk means you don't make as much money over the long-term – but they are dependable, and should keep a little trickle of money coming in even when the economy goes through a rough patch.

One good option is bonds.

For the latest Cooking the Books I talked to Mark Fowler from Hobson Wealth.

We discussed what bonds are, how to use them as part of your overall investment strategy, and the rare times when bonds can be high risk.

For the interview, watch the video podcast above, or play the audio here.

If you have a question about this podcast, or question you'd like answered in the next one, come and talk to me about it. I'm on Facebook here, Instagram here and Twitter here.

You can subscribe to this podcast on iHeartRadio, Apple podcasts app, or Spotify, to make sure you never miss an episode.