It’s a real quandary today. No advice. Cash allows you breathing room to see what develops.
For my really “safe” money I’ve moved to GNMA funds. Expect to lose a bit, but it’s a comfort having a degree of federal backing for GNMA paper. A good manager might be able to grab off an extra percent or two above cash or TIPs over longer periods. (Both of mine are 1-2% underwater YTD.) Checking duration at Yahoo (under “holdings”) one fund is less than 3 years out and the other between 4 and 5 years. I wouldn’t go over 5 years on duration.
Balanced funds in general? I’ve stuck with mine. Worst case: managers will go very short term with the bond portion - costing some return potential, but also mitigating the fund’s volatility - a big reason for owning balanced funds.
The only muni I have is PRIHX. Price calls it “intermediate”, but it behaves more like a short-term bond fund. That might be why it doesn’t score well at M* and the rest. FYI - a bet on munis - especially longer term - is a bet on the economy. Under recessionary pressures, including high unemployment, state and local (tax) revenue declines while expenses may actually increase due to unemployment benefits. This can lead to downgrades of the bonds they’ve issued.

Since 10 year rules, inherited accounts and 401(k)s have been mentioned, I'll throw in another technical detail:
A lump sum distribution from an employer sponsored plan inherited from a participant born before 1936 can apply 10 year income averaging. In effect, one gets the money up front but is taxed as though one drew it out over ten years.
https://www.irahelp.com/slottreport/what-you-need-know-about-special-10-year-income-averaging
I actually have run into this situation. Though I wasn't the beneficiary.

@msf said,
"- Inherited Roth IRAs have RMDs."
There is no Require Minimum Distribution for Inheirted IRAs, but instead, a Required Full Withdrawal following the 5 or 10 year rule. One could wait 10 years before making that one full required withdrawal providing an additional 10 years of tax free growth from the date of inheritance.
This article does a good job of explaining Inherited (Roth) IRAs:
https://fool.com/retirement/plans/inherited-iras/
1. A spouse (as a beneficiary) can rollover an Inherited Roth IRA (from a deceased spouse) and continue to enjoy no RMDs.
2. Withdraw the funds as a lump sum. You may withdraw all of the money from the original owner's IRA as a single lump sum. Doing so gives you a lot of money now, but also results in a high tax bill for the current year, unless you're withdrawing the funds from a Roth IRA that the original owner held for at least five years. In that case, you won’t owe any taxes on these withdrawals. However, if the owner didn’t have the account for at least five years, then you could owe income taxes on the Roth IRA earnings.
3. Use the five- or 10-year withdrawal method. The five- or 10-year withdrawal method enables you to withdraw money as often as you'd like and in whatever increments you choose, as long as the money is completely withdrawn within five or 10 years. If you fail to withdraw all the funds in time, then you'll pay a 50% penalty on whatever remains in the account.
You have five years to withdraw all the money from an inherited IRA if the account owner died in 2019 or earlier, and 10 years if they died in 2020 or later.
For all of us, this can be very confusing. If you have a specific scenario (question). I would suggest reader's ask their questions on the Ed Slott (Discussion Forum). It is a great IRA resource.
https://irahelp.com/phpBB

Howdy folks,
The government statistics on inflation are rubbish and have been since they started 'adjusting' them in the 80s. Too many COLAs and other ties to the CPI. feh. It's called screwing the public and hiding the facts about the dollar.
@Hank you mentioned that housing was eliminated in the early 1980s. Other things also. Here is Shadow Stats showing CPI like they calculated it in the 80s' and later the 90's. Ever hear of Hedonic adjustments? That's when a product is 'new and improved' they can charge more and the increase is no included. That's fine if you can still buy the old and unimproved item. Right.
Notice that he has the earlier version of inflation running about 12-13%
http://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data/inflation-charts
They're still dealing with the Unfunded Liabilities overhang that we've talked about for years now. What some $100 T. Their choices were to break as many promises as politically possible and deflate the currency by about 50%. Please note that it's down 96% since '13 so it only has to go to 2%. Easy. And let's not talk about the strong US dollar. Er, it's the cleanest pair of dirty socks in the hamper.
and so it goes,
peace and wear the damn mask,
rono

My initial objection was to the assertion as to the reasons for the removal of home prices, nothing more.

You not only objected but offered an alternative explanation regarding the CPI-U calculation. My comments pertained to that alternative explanation, nothing more.
Accepting that explanation, then rather than reintegrate housing prices into the CPI-U as Carson did, we should remove vehicles from the CPI-U. Thus the 2021/2020 (Y/Y) CPI-U increase is actually significantly lower than reported.
That's not being contradictory. That's working with your thesis and exploring its implications. I didn't say whether vehicles should be excluded from the CPI-U. I did ask whether you agreed with where your thesis led - that vehicle price increases should not be counted in calculating the CPI-U.
Maybe, despite the statistics, your gut tells you that on some continuum car purchases resemble day-to-day expenses more closely than do home acquisitions which are "rare years-apart purchases." Perhaps looking at different inflation component will help clarify what you have in mind with this continuum.
College educations, rather than being rare year-apart, are often one time purchases. On average, people tend to attend college once in a lifetime. Many never attend college. Some may attend even multiple times without attaining a degree. Others may make multiple "purchases", i.e. earn multiple degrees.
Regardless of the precise average number of college education purchases per lifetime, the purchasing of college educations would seem to share many attributes with home purchases - infrequent, not a day-to-day type of expense, something one budgets for years in advance, something that is paid for over a period of years, something that is "consumed" over multiple years.
Help us understand whether the reason you gave for excluding home prices from the CPI-U also excludes the cost of college educations.

IMO M* stopped being relevant to me years ago. Their move into managing money shifted how their 'analysts' covered stocks and as a result their insights and newsletters (which were ususally good) really began to lose value to me since they became less opinion and more quant-based ... it felt almost as if they used regulatory COI language to avoid directly speaking about things and/or 'making a case' like they used to.

@crash - it's not for everyone but
IOFIX - 1yr.: +18.29% although after last year there really wasn't much place to go but up.
YTD: +13.7%
Yield: 3.98%

IOFIX generated excellent category returns from inception (05/28/2015) through 2019.
IIRC correctly, volatility was low and the Sharpe ratio was high during this period.
The fund then delivered an unpleasant surprise when it returned -36.18% during Q1 2020.
IOFIX seemed like a safe fund for years...

Two petty technical points:
- You're supposed to calculate the RMD for each IRA and then add them together. Usually that comes out the same as adding the values together and then dividing, since:
$A / N years + $B / N years = $(A+B) / N years.
But in rare cases you could have a different N for two IRAs.
If on one IRA the sole beneficiary is your spouse, who is more than 10 years your junior, you use Table II (Joint Life and Last Survivor Expectancy) for the divisor. If the situation is different on another IRA (e.g. beneficiary is sibling), then you use the customary Table III (Uniform Lifetime) to find the divisor.
- Inherited Roth IRAs have RMDs.

Why should rare years-apart purchases be included in widely impacting run-of-the-mill inflation calcs? ...

Do you disagree with the BLS for including the prices of new and used motor vehicles in its CPI calculations?

It's a continuum, arguable, debated, ...

The only antecedent for "it" I can see is periodicity of purchases, so I'll infer that this continuum is the length of time between purchases.
Until the past decade or so, average time of home ownership was about four years. For example:

Source page: https://ipropertymanagement.com/research/average-length-of-homeownership
New car ownership in 2017 was almost seven years, or just a shade less than home ownership since the GFC.
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/05/28/car-owners-are-holding-their-vehicles-for-longer-which-is-both-good-and-bad.html
Is this minuscule difference in holding periods really what you want to pin your continuum premise on?
I'm sure you're aware that when housing costs (including investment attributes) had been used in calculating the CPI, those costs included mortgage interest, property taxes, insurance, and maintenance expenses. That's in the paper I cited.
Paraphrasing your original question, why should frequent, periodic cash outflows (interest, taxes, insurance, and maintenance costs) be excluded from widely impacting run-of-the-mill inflation calcs? Even if those costs fluctuate wildly from month to month as construction (maintenance) costs have done this year.

Some potentially worrisome thoughts …
- Could Zukerberg someday control the universe through this augmented reality?
- Would an augmented reality “Big Mac” taste as good as the real thing? (If it could be made 0 calorie I might buy one.)
Also - Elon Musk, arguably one of the smartest visionaries alive, has been warning about the dangers of AI for several years now.
2018 Article

The inflation headline statistic is 5.4%. 5.9% is the adjustment for SS. That affects only SS receipients. It is based on CPI-W which is different from the marquee inflation metric CPI-U.
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/cpi.pdf
As I posted previously, CPI-E is even lower. According to the CPI-E excel spreadsheet data, this Y/Y figure as of Sept was about 5%.
There are also those who feel that items that are purchased infrequently shouldn't even be counted. On that basis, perhaps we should pull out the figures for vehicles like used cars and trucks. Their costs went up 24.7% over the past twelve months. As you wrote, some things we can control, and most people don't need to buy a vehicle in any given year.
Moving on to bonds, the three funds RPSIX, PRSNX, and PTIAX all have credit ratings of junk by M*. (This does not represent a tactical move by these funds; over the past several years they have been consistently rated junk.)
Junk bonds tend to have moderately high correlation with equities, and so share a similar (albeit muted) risk profiles. This has been a good year for equities and for junk bonds.
Here's a correlation matrix of the four funds. R² over the past year with respect to MWHYX (a junk bond fund) ranges from 49% for PTIAX to over 75% for RPSIX and PRSNX.

@Anna, Where is IBM I wonder (article below asked this question 10 years ago...Article date is 2011)?
where-the-heck-is-ibm
They are somewhere still:
ibm-will-reskill-30-million-people-by-2030-for-future-technology-jobs/
Sept 30th 2021 ibm-kyndryl-spin-off/
Even the IBM Employee Credit Union has morphed into "Intelligent - Thinking" (iThink):
ibm-southeast-employees-credit-union-is-moving-to-ithink-financial-credit-union

>> owing to political and statistical issues
This is silly, or at best tendentious. Why should rare years-apart purchases be included in widely impacting run-of-the-mill inflation calcs? Go read the many articles posted here about what the 'official' rates comprise, and why.

Do you disagree with the BLS for including the prices of new and used motor vehicles in its CPI calculations?
https://www.bls.gov/cpi/factsheets/new-vehicles.htm

It's a continuum, arguable, debated, as you know despite your automatic contrariness and as (I think) you may have written about; see this from a half-year ago:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/16/opinion/economy-inflation-retail-sales.amp.html
embedded inflation, which is the kind of inflation we really need to worry about, is inflation in prices that don’t change very often.

etc.

The Economist: “House prices were included in America's CPI between 1953 and 1983 before being removed. This was partly because indexing benefits and pensions to inflation had become expensive and some politicians wanted to bring measured inflation down”
Source:

Here's a Monthly Labor Review (MLR) piece written contemporaneously (June 1982) with the announcement (late 1981) of the change in how housing costs would be included in the CPI.
https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/1982/06/art2full.pdf
Government expenditures, though not mentioned in the paper, could have been part of the reason for the change. As stated in The Economist, that would be strictly a data driven decision, i.e. based simply on the fact that housing prices were rising rapidly.
The MLR piece notes that there had been a recent statutory change in how government revenue would be affected by inflation. That change called for a more accurate CPI calculation:

In addition to problems of data adequacy, impetus to change the homeownership component stems from an important new use of the index. The Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981 (Public Law 97-34) requires use of the CPI for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U) for escalation of income tax brackets and the personal exemption amount. The law requires announcement of the new tax brackets in December 1984 based on CPI-U data for the prior 2 years. This is a major new use of the index which will have a broad effect on total Federal Government revenues, and this new use underscores the importance of action to ensure that the CPI reflects consumption cost experience of consumers to the fullest extent possible.

>> owing to political and statistical issues
This is silly, or at best tendentious. Why should rare years-apart purchases be included in widely impacting run-of-the-mill inflation calcs? Go read the many articles posted here about what the 'official' rates comprise, and why.

Do you disagree with the BLS for including the prices of new and used motor vehicles in its CPI calculations?
https://www.bls.gov/cpi/factsheets/new-vehicles.htm

Here’s a colorful (albeit slanted) blurb from this week’s Barron’s under the title “The Striking Price: A Smart Trade for Heady Times” - by Steven Sears
“Now, almost 100 years later, the market construct has seemingly changed. The shoeshine boy's figurative heirs have grown rich buying stocks, digital currencies, and other risk assets … The S&P 500 index just hit another record high, and activity has reached a fever pitch. The options market, which enables investors to magnify their stock bets at relatively low cost, has seen daily trading volumes rise to about 40 million contracts a day, up from maybe a million in 2000.”
Barron’s 10/25/2021
* Represents the views of one contributor. The publication contains both “bull” and “bear” case analyses.

>> owing to political and statistical issues
This is silly, or at best tendentious. Why should rare years-apart purchases be included in widely impacting run-of-the-mill inflation calcs? Go read the many articles posted here about what the 'official' rates comprise, and why.

Schwab & Vanguard allow this & request you notify the other brokerage of what you're doing, as far as I know.
( After rereading I didn't answer your question. Schwab allow this as I've been doing it for a few years,

“What if the discount rate is higher or we lower the assumed yield to reflect the uncertainty surrounding buybacks? Today’s market would appear overvalued. On the other hand, perhaps the pandemic has temporarily depressed dividends and buybacks—and the buyback yield will jump sharply in the year ahead, making stocks seem relatively cheap.”
Reminds one of the line about “a one-handed economist.”
That’s a very thoughtful piece overall. And Yikes - Mentions that the S&P fell 34% in early 2020. I’d sure like another crack at those prices.
@Old_Joe - What you say is true. But inflation’s probably averaged 5-7% annually in recent years. Equity prices seem way out ahead of that (by S&P and other averages). If inflation were to catch up to the market gains of recent years we’d be looking at much worse than present level.
-
One thought …
I’ve been taught that in investing there exists a rough correlation between risk and reward. So how does one reconcile 1-2% returns on “safe” bonds now for several years along with double-digit gains in equities over many of those same years? Do today’s investors in the S&P index (or similar fund) really feel like they’re taking 5 or 10 times the amount of risk that’s inherent in an AAA rated corporate or government bond? That’s where I’m having some trouble reconciling all this. Risk / reward seems out-of-whack.

I came across this link on another forum & wondered to myself, how many brokerages do I need ? Two at the present time seems to be right ! A few years back the number was (4).