Returning to this thread with roughly the same personal situation but (I think) a different economic situation:
I have at least $50k that I'm not going to be touching for the next couple years. So, I'd like to put that somewhere better than a savings account. I'm thinking about putting it in a low-cost intermediate-term bond fund (I guess maybe this one
https://personal.vanguard.com/us/fun...FundIntExt=INT). My reasoning is that this is relatively low-risk (i.e., the odds of me losing more than 10% of my investment are pretty low), the yields aren't bad right now (3% on 10-year treasury bonds seems pretty solid to me), inflation is very low, and the fed doesn't seem to be artificially inflating prices on these longer-term bonds anymore.
Alternatively, I could invest in just straight treasury bonds, but it seems like diversification and higher yields probably justify buying riskier corporate bonds. I could buy short-term bonds, but yields are crap. I could buy longer-term bonds, but that exposes me to a lot more risk. I could also buy foreign bonds (either denominated in dollars or not), but I know very little about this.
Country you live in
US
Income
Extremely variable. I have ~30k fixed income as a PhD student, and I do a variety of other things on the side that earn me somewhere between $0 and $200k/year.
Risk Tolerance
Medium
Timeframe for investment
Possibly 2 years (I could see myself wanting to buy an apartment in ~2 years). More likely 5-10 years.
Debt
None
Other stuff
I have additional retirement investments in a fund that is almost entirely stocks, and I'll likely be investing more in a similar fund in a couple months come tax time. So I don't really need more exposure to the stock market.