The preferred ETFs, Invesco Preferred and iShares US Preferred, yield 5.8% and 6.1%, respectively, and trade roughly at their “par” value, which means we’re paying $1 for $1 in preferred shares. Meanwhile, Nuveen Preferred & Income Securities Fund (JPS), a CEF, yields more (7.5%) and trades for just 96 cents on the dollar! Plus, it has the benefit

For bond funds, upside can come in two ways. First, when the price of a fund lags its net asset value, there is a “discount window” which could subsequently narrow or close. A buyer pays, say, $0.90 for $1.00 of actual investment value (who wouldn’t do that all day long?). We specifically target funds when they are unfairly out of favor and have

For quick profits, it’s actually best to buy munis after mini-panics. These seem to happen every year or two, presenting us level-headed contrarians with safe yields for cheap. Anyone who followed this advice and bought munis after the irrational “tax plan panic” in November 2016, when fear gripped the markets that the Trump tax plan would lower

The secret is to buy bonds the big money isn’t allowed to. To illustrate the point further, let’s look at the BlackRock Floating Rate Income Strategies Fund (FRA), which buys floating-rate debt. (More about floating-rate debt in a moment). For now, just know that most of the bonds it buys are issued by corporations, and most of them are below the

And today, DoubleLine Income Solutions is still offering a 9.7% yield net of fees. That’s an unbelievable payout in today’s world.

If you’re looking for tax exempt bonds, you may be attracted to the BlackRock Taxable Muni Bond Fund (BBN) at number two, with its juicy 6.5% yield and 9.2% annualized return since inception. However, that yield is only partly tax exempt, because the fund also buys taxable bonds. There are other municipal bond funds that focus exclusively on tax

The familiar names can’t recommend our high-income producers to you. Instead, they stick you in pretty much what everyone has. And one more thing. If these are stocks, owning them is not much different than owning a low-cost index fund from Vanguard. The same stocks dominate the same market indexes Vanguard uses! If you own a handful of the big

But our goal here is to show that for those of you planning to live off your investments in whole or in part, you can have more income, live better than you thought, and maintain your principal. You won’t see it at the big shops like Merrill Lynch, Wells Fargo, Morgan Stanley, or JPMorgan Chase, not because they don’t know what you’ve just read,

Two simple yet important things set Main Street apart: 1.The firm increases its investment income annually, and 2.It pays a conservative dividend so that it never has to cut it. Since its IPO in 2007, Main Street has boosted its dividend (which is paid monthly) a lovely 77%. It’s never been cut. The company smartly keeps a buffer and pays out extra