The general advice of the stock market always has been – buy stocks for the long-term. One will ask what the ‘length’ of the term should be. When you buy a stock, think of yourself as a business partner forever – that is, until you need the cash. Still, thinking about forever even in terms of, say, 30 years is quite inconceivable.

Fixed income investments have been a very popular form of investment. They usually pay the returns on a fixed, predetermined schedule, although the amount of the payments could vary. While the individual bonds may be the most-known kind of fixed income securities, the category of fixed income investments also includes money market funds, CDs, bond funds, and fixed income exchange-traded funds (ETFs), which shall be discussed in this article.

A bond fund is one of the popular investment pools. Basically, a fund that is invested in bonds or other debt instruments is called a bond fund; it is also known as a debt fund. Investments of bond funds may contain government, municipal, agency, corporate bonds and assets-backed securities. Some bond funds focus on covering the wide bond market by investing in both short and long-term bonds and some other bond funds focus on the narrower portion of the bond market investing in short-term treasury fund or a corporate high-yield fund.