Where does an 18 month roof fund live if not a savings account

Liquidity and price certainty are two different things and the meetup advice mixed them up. Being able to sell in two days means you can always get out. It says nothing about what you get out at. Mortgage REITs are levered around 5 to 8 times equity on the agency side, so a small move in the value of the underlying bonds turns into a much larger move in the share price. That's the whole reason the yield is high.

Your 62k has a hard date and a job attached to it. That makes it a reserve, and reserves are graded on whether the full amount shows up when called, not on what they earned. The 4 percent account gets a 100 percent score on that test.

If you want to do better than 4 without taking price risk, the tools are boring instruments that mature on or before your date, so the timing of the payout is yours instead of the market's. Ladder something to land a month before the roof work. Talk to whoever handles your accounts about what's available and confirm terms in writing.

The mortgage REIT question is worth revisiting later with money that has no date on it. Different bucket, different rules.

pike has it. I'll add the annoying version from experience: the week you need the money is disproportionately likely to be a week when everything is priced badly, because the same conditions that break your roof timeline tend to break markets. I've been on the wrong side of that twice and both times the loss was bigger than every yield I'd chased to get there.