Bonds - Financially Free Folks

Understand how bonds work, what moves their prices, and how to use them in a portfolio.

Start With the Basics

The building blocks: what you own, how the market works and what a quoted yield means.

Start here

The lending contract, cash flows and core terms behind one of finance’s oldest ideas.

Follow a bond from its initial issuance to trading between investors.

Why a fixed-rate bond’s price and yield move in opposite directions.

Compare coupon rate, current yield, yield to maturity and real yield.

How government, corporate and municipal bonds differ by issuer and risk.

Read market moves and judge the risks behind a bond’s yield.

Why the same change in yields can move some bond prices much more than others.

Read normal, inverted and flat curves, and understand their limits as signals.

The forces behind Treasury moves, from Fed expectations to supply and risk sentiment.

What the extra yield over a Treasury benchmark can tell you about credit risk.

What the letter grades mean, how they are assigned and where their limits begin.

How inflation, policy and rising yields reshaped the bond market from 2022 onward.

Explore ways to access the market and use bonds for portfolio and cash-flow decisions.

Compare access through individual bonds, ETFs and futures.

Income, diversification and allocation, with lessons from the 2022 selloff.

Spread maturities across time to manage reinvestment decisions and planned cash needs.

How inflation-adjusted principal and real yields shape TIPS returns.

Choose an approach based on allocation size, timing and the exposure you want.