What bonds do I keep and which do I cash, why is the interest so different
Bonds released at the same time have different interest rates because they have different levels of risks and liquidity associated.  Risk will depend on the company / country / municipality that offers the bond: their financial position, and their resulting ability to make future payments & avoid default. Riskier organizations must offer higher interest rates to ensure that investors remain willing to loan them money. Liquidity depends on the terms of the loan - principal-only bonds give you minimal liquidity, as there are no ongoing interest payments, and nothing received until the bond's maturity date. All bonds provide lower liquidity if they have longer maturity dates. Bonds with lower liquidity must have higher returns to compensate for the fact that you will have to give up your cash for a longer period of time. Bonds released at different times will have different interest rates because of what the general 'market rate' for interest was in those periods. ie: if a bond is released in 2016 with interest rates approaching 0%, even a high risk bond would have a lower interest rate than a bond released in the 1980s, when market rates were approaching 20%. Some bonds offer variable interest tied to some market indicator - those will typically have higher interest at the time of issuance, because the bondholder bears some risk that the prevailing market rate will drop. Note regarding sale of bonds after market rates have changed: The value of your bonds will fluctuate with the market. If a bond was offered with 1% interest, and next year interest rates go up and a new identical bond is offered for 2% interest, when you sell your old bond you will take a loss, because the market won't want to pay full price for it anymore. Whether you should sell lower-interest rate bonds depends on how you feel about the factors above - do you want junk bonds that have stock-like levels of returns but high risks of default, maturing in 30 years? Or do you want AAA+ Bonds that have essentially 0% returns maturing in 30 days? If you are paying interest on debt, it is quite likely that you could achieve a net income benefit by selling the bonds, and paying off debt [assuming your debt has a higher interest rate than your low-rate bonds]. Paying off debt is sometimes referred to as a 'zero risk return', because essentially there is no real risk that your lender would otherwise go bankrupt. That is, you will owe your bank the car loan until you pay it, and paying it is the only thing you can do to reduce it.  However, some schools of thought suggest that maintaining savings + liquid investments makes sense even if you have some debt, because cash + liquid investments can cover you in some emergencies that credit cards can't help you with. ie: if you lose your job, perhaps your credit could be pulled and you would have nothing except for your liquid savings to tide you over. How much you should save in this way is a matter of opinion, but often repeated numbers are either 3 months or 6 months worth [which is sometimes taken as x months of expenses, and sometimes as x months of after-tax income]. You should look into this issue further; there are many questions on this site that discuss it, I'm sure.
The prime rate is the interest rate banks use amongst themselves to lend money to each other only. It is used as the basis (sometimes) for what interest rate banks charge you.  The prime rate is based loosely on the Fed rate.  There is a committee that meets regularly to set this and other industry interest rates. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prime_rate I am not 100% positive the following is totally accurate The banks keep our deposits and pay us interest for doing so.  They are paying us interest because they take yours, mine and everybody elses deposits as a large lump sum and invest that money.  Sometimes as business loans, sometimes as mortgages and sometimes as credit card. The banks have a book of business that will be EXACTLY how much credit they have extended to everybody.  But they do not keep that amount of cash in the vaults, only some smaller percentage of that large amount.  When I use my credit card and they need to transfer money to amazon.com, if they don't happen to have enough cash that day, they will just borrow from another bank that does, and the interest rate they pay to do so is the prime rate.  Since they are paying interest on the money they borrow to pay the debt I charged because they told me my credit was worth so much (...???...) they charge me a little bit more than that. Hence your credit card or mortgage's APR being based on the prime rate. I THINK that is what they do  If I am wrong leave a comment and I will update, or the mods can. "It is important to distinguish between cause and effect as well as the supply (saving) versus demand (borrowing) side of money to understand the relationship between interest rates, bond yields, and inflation. What is mean by ""interest rates"" is usually based on the officially published rates determined by the central bank and is referenced to the overnight lending rate for meeting reserve requirements.  In practice, what the means is, (for example) in the United States the Federal Reserve will have periodic meetings to determine whether to leave this rate alone or to raise or lower the rate.  The new rate is generally determined by their assessment of current and forecast national and global economic conditions and factors in the votes of the various Regional Federal Reserve Presidents.  If the Fed anticipates economic weakness they will tend to lower and keep rates lower, while when the economy seems to be overheated the tendency will be to raise rates. Bond yields are also based on the expectation of future economic conditions, but as determined by market participants.  At times the market will actually ""lead"" the Fed in bidding bond prices up or down, while at other times it will react after the Fed does.  However, ignoring the varying time lag the two generally will track each other because they are really the same thing.  The only difference is the participants which are collectively determining what the rates/yields are. The inverse relationship between interest rates and inflation is the main reason for fluctuating rates in the first place.  The Fed will tend to raise rates to try to slow inflation, and lower rates when it feels inflation is too low and economic growth should be stimulated.  Likewise, when the economy is doing poorly there is both little inflationary pressure (driving interest rates down both in terms of what savers can accept to keep ahead of inflation and at) and depressed levels of borrowing (reduced demand for money, driving down rates to try to balance supply and demand), and the opposite is true when the economy is booming. Bond yields are thus positively correlated to inflation because during periods of high inflation savers won't want to invest in bonds that don't provide them with an acceptable inflation adjusted yield.  But high interest rates tend to have the effect or reining in inflation because it gets more costly for borrowers and thus puts a damper on new economic activity. So to summarize," "Here's an answer to a related question I once wrote. I'm reposting here.  I can, but it takes a significant amount of time.   I'll do a short version which unfortunatley might leave more holes than you like. Basically, traders don't want to barter because it is hard to find the person with precisely the goods you want who wants to trade for the goods you have. Thus the need for ""coupons"" that represent value in a marketplace. Then you need to decide who gets to create coupons. If too many can issue them, problems arise, and no one trusts the coupons will be good later. Eventually you want one large bank/nation/trader to be able to issue them so everyone has the same level of trust in them, and you don't have the economic inefficiencies of many coupon issuers.  Next, the number of coupons needs to be enough to facilitate trade. If the amount of trade increases a lot, and the number of coupons doesn't increase similarly they become worth more, and people start to hoard them. This causes deflation, which causes less investment, which causes less growth, which hurts everyone in the long run.   If there are too many coupons added, this causes inflation, which causes people to spent them quicker instead of holding them. For reasons I won't cover here slight, predictable inflation is much better than deflation, so remember inflation is slightly preferred. Note that inflation is often caused not by the number of coupons but by external price changes.  Now, for a modern economy to do well, somone has to watch the economy, measure it carefully, and add/subtract coupons into the system as needed. Coupons, like all money, have no real value (whatever that means), but only have value because the holder expects to be able to trade them *later* for goods and services. You cannot eat coupons, use them for shelter (usually!), or wear them, but you want to trade them for such needs. The same is true for paper money, gold, stones, or almost whatever money system one uses. Money in all these forms is merely an IOU tradable for future goods.  The Fed is tasked (among other things) with making sure there is precisely enough coupons in the economy to keep trade functioning as well as possible. This is very hard to do since there are external and internal shocks to an economy (think disaster, foreign govts shutting off resources, rapid changes in people's tastes, etc.).   Central banks such as the Fed need to be independent of political control, since empirical evidence has shown that politicians tend to add more money to the system than is needed, because the short term gains give them votes, but the long term consequences (rapid inflation, unemployment, lower economic growth) are bad for society. This is why the Fed is largely out of congressional control, and large amounts of empirical evidence across hundreds of years and dozens of cultures shows this to be good.  Note: another function of the Fed is to be a lender of last resort to help prevent bank panics that were widespread in the 18th and early 19th century, something that none of us now remember, but it was a real problem. I'll skip that part for now.  So now we're at the point where the Fed needs to add/subtract coupons from society. To do this part justice takes significant time to cover all the reasons why various rules are in place (banking reserve requirements, for example), and you cannot learn it from one pass of reading.  But I'll try. Instead of being like the majority of internet fools that rail against the system, try to learn the *why* of all this, and you'll be much wiser and understand that it is all a pretty good system.  One method they use is the interbank lending rate. Banks have a reserve requirement, which is the ratio of coupons they need to have on hand as a ratio compared to the total coupons depositors lent them. This is usually around 1:10. The amount deposited that they can lend goes to business loans, school loans, mortgage loans, etc., and helps economies grow. Now when a bank on a given day falls short due to too many withdrawals, other banks (or the Fed) offers an overnight loan to meet reserve requirements, and the Fed sets the interest rate, which in turn drives other interest rates in the system.  This does not change the money supply very much.  Secondly, the Fed sets the reserve requirement, which vastly can change the amount of money available to society. But they change this rate so rarely (all the historical data is on the St. Loius Fed site, among others) that it is not usually an issue. I'll explain below how this can drastically change the money supply though the money multiplier.  Thirdly, and this is the part the poster above seems upset about, they conduct open market operations. This is the primary means by which the Fed exercises control over the number of coupons in play. The government, like businesses, like individuals, often needs to borrow money, in theory to invest in wise causes like infrastructure or perhaps money making enterprises such as technology investmeny (and I know what they often use the money for causes many to complain). The government, like companies, offers the sale of various contracts such as bonds to investors, who want a place to park some accumulated coupons for safety, and they get a return plus some interest. So the government sells bonds on the open market to investors, banks, pensions, foreign governments, basically to whomever wishes to purchase them at the market rate, and the government, like many individuals and banks, uses these loans to perform day to day functioning and possible smooth out volatility in spending needs. By law the Fed cannot purchase directly from Treasury. Now, once on the market, these bonds are traded, packaged, resold, etc., since they have inherent value, and since those owning them want to buy/sell them, perhaps before maturity date. This ""liquidity"" (ability to sell your goods) is necessary - fewer would purchase an item if they could not sell it when they desire. Thus bonds are bought, sold, and traded, and their prices fluctuate based on what the market thinks they are worth, just like any good.  Now, the Fed can buy/sell these bonds on the *open market*, like anyone else. So when the Fed wishes to increase the money supply, they can buy bonds that are not ""spendable"" money and inject money into the system. Note they now hold a bond that had at the time of transaction the same value as the money they injected. Note investors freely bought these from Treasury, meaning the market thought at the time of purchase that this was a good invesement. It is *not* the government merely wishing more money into existance. It is market forces that require more money for trades and is selling goods from the marketplace of (presumably) equal value to the Fed. This increases liquidity, but takes valuable assets from circulation. When the Fed wishes to shrink the money supply, they sell these bonds back into circulation basically by offering better terms than Treasury. In fact, you can find graphs of the Fed operations and see how every December they inject money for more Christmas shpping (need more coupons for more trade) and every January they extract some.  So open market transactions, buying and selling goods at market prices in the marketplace along with other traders, is how the Fed injects and removes money from the money supply. This is the primary mechanism that the Fed uses to control the number of coupons in the economy.  Finally, a little about reserve requirements and the money multiplier, since it affects so much of the number of coupons in play. This also I must simplify drastically. Each bank needs to hold 1/10 of all deposits in cash. The rest can be lent, which lands in another bank, which again can be lent, etc... Thus each $1 deposited can result in loans totalling 9/10 + (9/10)^2 + (9/10)^3 +... = 9 more dollars. Many people claim that banks are printing money, which is nonsense, since each also has an equal debt to pay to the person they borrowed from. When all loans are paid back there is no net money gain.  However, this allows for each $1 the Fed injects by buying bonds for there to be up to $9 in the economy, *if banks all loan to the fullest extent*. Banks tend to want to loan since loaned money makes them profit. Banks used to loan too much and runs on the banks caused significant problems, which is why laws were made to require *all* banks to have the same reserve requirement.  Now, when banks get scared and stop loaning, this 9 fold multiplier dries up, and the Fed has much less inpact on being able to target the proper number of coupons to keep the economy smooth. During the recent crash when banks stopped loaning, as each dollar was paid back on debts, there was significant shrinkage of available money for transactions, and this kills the economy. This is the ""liquidity crisis"".   Hope this helps. As I said, this is vastly simplified and I cannot go into all the reasons and historical items needed to understand it fully. It is a vastly complex (and necessarily so) and takes significant study to grasp the genius of it. It's similar to not being able to understand nuances of particle physics in one go, but as you study and work at it you see *why* things go as they do, and you learn all the failed methods (the gold standard is one example) that were thrown out for many good reasons.  Cheers." "This seems to be a very emotional thing for people and there are a lot of conflicting answers.  I agree with JoeTaxpayer in general but I think it's worth coming at it from a slightly different angle. You are in Canada and you don't get to deduct anything for your mortgage interest like in the US, so that simplifies things a bit.  The next thing to consider is that in an amortized mortgage, the later payments include increasingly more principal.  This matters because the extra payments you make earlier in the loan have much more impact on reducing your interest than those made at the end of the loan. Why does that matter?  Let's say for example, your loan was for $100K and you will end up getting $150K for the sale after all the transaction costs.  Consider two scenarios: If you do the math, you'll see that the total is the same in both scenarios.  Nominally, $50K of equity is worth the same as $50K in the bank. ""But wait!"" you protest, ""what about the interest on the loan?""  For sure, you likely won't get 2.89% on money in a bank account in this environment.  But there's a big difference between money in the bank and equity in your house: you can't withdraw part of your equity.  You either have to sell the house (which takes time) or you have to take out a loan against your equity which is likely going to be more expensive than your current loan. This is the basic reasoning behind the advice to have a certain period of time covered.  4 months isn't terrible but you could have more of a cushion.  Consider things like upcoming maintenance or improvements on the house.  Are you going to need a new roof before you move?  New driveway or landscape improvements?  Having enough cash to make a down-payment on your next home can be a huge advantage because you can make a non-contingent offer which will often be accepted at a lower value than a contingent offer. By putting this money into your home equity, you essentially make it inaccessible and there's an opportunity cost to that.  You will also earn exact 0% on that equity.  The only benefit you get is to reduce a loan which is charging you a tiny rate that you are unlikely to get again any time soon. I would take that extra cash and build more cushion.  I would also put as much money into any tax sheltered investments as you can.  You should expect to earn more than 2.89% on your long-term investments.  You really aren't in debt as far as the house goes as long as you are not underwater on the loan: the net value of that asset is positive on your balance sheet.  Yes you need to keep making payments but a big account balance covers that.  In fact if you hit on hard times and you've put all your extra cash into equity, you might ironically not being able to make your payments and lose the home. One thing I just realized is that since you are in Canada, you probably don't have a fixed-rate on your mortgage.  A variable-rate loan does make the calculation different.  If you are concerned that rates may spike significantly, I think you still want to increase your cushion but whether you want to increase long-term investments depends on your risk tolerance." This is a very common misconception. I've been studying equities and credits for a while now, and the simplest way to explain the difference is this:  - Credit is about stable cash flows. Your investment in a bond has almost (read: almost) nothing to do with growth rate. It has everything to do with how stable the cash flows are and interest coverage.  - Equity is about growth. No wonder companies with highly irregular cash flows (e.g., every single young tech company in the history of tech companies) can have the most in-demand equity while few bond investors would touch them with a ten foot pole. There are a few other factors possible here: Taxes - Something you don't mention is what are the tax rates on each of those choices.  If the 4% gain is taxed at 33% while the 3% government bond is taxed at 0% then it may well make more sense to have the government bond that makes more money after taxes. Potential changes in rates - Could that 4% rate change at any time?  Yield curves are an idea here to consider where at times they can become inverted where short-term bonds yield more than long-term bonds due to expectations about rates.  Some banks may advertise a special rate for a limited time to try to get more deposits and then change the rate later.  Beware the fine print. Could the bond have some kind of extra feature on it?  For example, in the US there are bonds known as TIPS that while the interest rate may be low, there is a principal adjustment that comes as part of the inflation adjustment that is part how the security is structured. I'll get to my answer in a moment, but first need to put focus on the two key components of bond prices: interest rates and credit risk. Suppose that the 10-year treasury has a coupon of 2% per year (it would be paid as 1% twice per year, in reality). If you own one contract of the bond which we suppose has a so-called face-value of $100, then this contract will over the ten years pay you a total of $20 in coupons, then $100 at redemption. So $120 in total. Would you therefore buy this 10-year treasury bond for $120, or more, or less? Well, if there were bank accounts around which were offering you an interest rate of 2% per year fixed for the next 10 years, then you could alternatively generate $120 from just $100 deposited now (if we assume that the interest paid is not put back in the account to earn 2% per year). Consequently, a price of $100 for the treasury would seem about right. However, suppose that you are not very confident that the banks that offer these accounts will even be around in 10 years time, maybe they will fail before that and you'll never get your money back. Then you might say to yourself that the above calculation is mathematically right, but not really a full representation of the different risks. And you conclude that maybe treasuries should be a bit more expensive, because they offer better credit risk than bank deposits.  All of this just to show that the price of bonds is a comparative valuation of rates and credit: you need to know the general level of interest rates available in other investment products (even in stocks, I'd say), you need to have a feel for how much credit risk there is in the different investment products. Most people think that 'normally' interest rates are positive, because we are so familiar with the basic principle that: if I lend you some money then you need to pay me some interest. But in a world where everyone is worried about bank failures, people might prefer to effectively 'deposit' our savings with the US treasury (by buying their bonds) than to deposit their savings in the local bank. The US treasury will see this extra demand and put up the prices of their  bonds (they are not stupid at the US treasury, you know!), so maybe the price of the 10-year treasury will go above $120. It could, right? In this scenario, the implied yield on the 10-year treasury is negative. There you go, yields have gone negative because of credit risk concerns. Talk about coincidence, we just recieved letters from our bank saying that our interest only loans will be going up by 0.46% and if we want to keep our lower rate we will need to change early to P&I. Now our Interest only periods end in 6 months to about 16 months anyway. We have decided to change to P&I early and save on our interest expenses. Why? Because the main purpose of investing is to make money not to save on tax. Even if you are on the highest marginal tax rate for every extra dollar of expenses you spend and claim as a deduction you will only get about 50 cents back through tax savings. If you are on the lowest marginal tax rate your tax savings will reduce to less than 20 cents for every extra dollar spent. If you are investing in order to save on tax you may be investing for the wrong reasons. Your primary reason for investing should be to make money, for wealth creation. A good reason to stay with an Interest only loan for an investment property would be if you require the extra cash flow you would receive compared with an I&P loan.