2025 BND Returns--and future implications

Thanks. I appreciate the kind words. As to how I manage things, I'm currently about 2% in a money market fund, and the other 98% in stocks. As it's now a new year, I just did a couple of withdrawals to get them into 2026 (versus 2025) for tax purposes. One was an RMD from an inherited IRA (I inherited it before the 10 year rules) and the other a withdrawal from a tax deferred vehicle. I put the money into our checking account and a Vanguard MMF, and as 2026 progresses I'll spend from these sources. We're having some work on our home done, but I hope the withdrawals will cover about 6 to 9 months worth of spending. I also spend the distributions from our taxable brokerage account, the interest from the MMF, and have a small pension amount, which is less than 10% of the income from the year. I am thinking about taking SS this year, but TBD. The largest cash equivalents position was probably about 5%, because I doubled the amount when a certain individual was elected in 2017. I gradually spent that down, and over the time I've never had to sell during a time the markets were down. [Here ](https://testfol.io/?s=eUusQ4TwB9O) is an analyzer comparing BND and cash equivalents from 1/1/2015 to 12/31/2025. There is a series of options listed under the returns and the 6th one from the left is called returns. If you click on that and scroll to the bottom it will show the annual returns of BND and the cash equivalents. As you can see, three of the years showed negative returns, although 2018 was marginally negative. On a cumulative basis, both returns pretty much sucked, but cash on a cumulative basis has still done better than BND. Again, restating my point about holding cash versus bonds, is the marginal extra yield you might get from holding a bond fund like BND (which has NOT existed for the last 11 years, it's been in the minus) is not worth the ups and downs of owning the bond fund.