Where to Invest Money for 1–5 Years: Yield Ladder Part 2

Capital at risk. Bonds, credit funds and lending platforms can lose value and borrowers can default. Past returns do not predict future returns. Rates and figures are as at August 2026 and change. Nothing here is personalised advice.

Everyone has an answer for two questions. "Where do I keep my emergency fund?" — a savings account, next. "Where do I put money for retirement?" — index funds, next.

Ask where to put the deposit you need in three years and the room goes quiet.

This is the awkward middle of personal finance, and it is where more real money gets damaged than anywhere else — not through disaster, but through two opposite mistakes that both feel sensible at the time.

The two mistakes

Mistake one: leaving it in cash for five years. It feels prudent. It is a slow, certain loss of purchasing power if inflation runs above your after-tax interest rate, and you will not notice it happening because the number on the screen never goes down.

Mistake two: putting it in the stock market. Equities are an excellent five-year average and an unreliable five-year specific. The market does not know your house deposit completes in March. A 30% drawdown four months before your deadline is not a theoretical risk; it is a thing that has happened to people who did everything else right.

The middle rung is not about maximising return. It is about buying a known outcome on a known date, and being paid something reasonable for the wait.

Start with the date, then choose the product

The trick that makes this whole rung tractable: write the date first. Then pick the instrument that matures near it.

That last row is the one that matters. If you genuinely do not know the date, you are back on rung one, and the price of that flexibility is a lower return. Pay it cheerfully — it is much cheaper than being forced to sell at the wrong moment.

The bond ladder: the least glamorous good idea in finance

A ladder is embarrassingly simple. Instead of buying one bond maturing in five years, you buy several maturing in one, two, three, four and five years. Every year one rung matures. You either spend it or roll it into a new five-year rung.

What that buys you:

The full mechanics, including how to size the rungs, are in our bond ladder strategy guide, and the practicalities of buying are in how to buy bonds online.

The catch is that a ladder is boring and takes an afternoon to set up. That is the entire catch. It is also why it works: there is nothing in it to get clever about.

Term deposits: the certainty product

A fixed-term deposit does one thing and does it perfectly — it tells you the exact amount you will have on an exact date, protected by the deposit guarantee (limits per country are in Part 1).

Use it when the date is fixed and non-negotiable: tuition, a visa fee, a completion date. Do not use it for money that might be needed early — early-exit penalties can wipe out more than the interest earned.

Short-duration credit and P2P: real yield, real homework

This is where the middle rung gets interesting, and where most of the damage happens.

Across Europe, peer-to-peer and short-term credit platforms advertise net returns broadly in the 9–13% range, with roughly 9–11% typical on large diversified consumer-loan platforms and 11–13% on higher-yield and shorter-term loans (Maclear, P2PEmpire, 2026). Realised returns tend to run below the advertised rate once idle cash and occasional losses are counted.

Those numbers are real. They are also not deposits, they are not guaranteed, and the difference between 11% advertised and 11% received is entirely a function of what you do next.

Three rules that separate people who keep the yield from people who donate it:

1. Licence first, rate second. Since the EU crowdfunding regulation (Regulation (EU) 2020/1503), platforms serving EU investors need an ECSP authorisation, and several operate under MiFID II instead. A licence is not a guarantee of anything — it is a floor. Platforms without one are a different category of risk.

2. Match maturity to your date. A 36-month loan book does not care that you need the money in 18 months. Secondary markets exist and they work — right up until the month everyone wants out at once.

3. Diversify across platforms, not just loans. The failure mode that hurts is platform failure, not borrower default. Spreading across hundreds of loans on one platform does nothing about that.

We go through the loan-book questions in detail in the sceptic's guide to P2P lending, and the platform-by-platform picture is in our complete P2P guide.

If you want to look at platforms directly, three we cover in depth: Robocash (short-duration consumer loans, buyback structure), Nectaro (EU-licensed, consumer loan portfolio) and Lande (agricultural loans secured on land and machinery). Read our reviews of Robocash, Nectaro and Lande before funding anything — the reviews are where the terms live.

A worked example: 30,000 for a deposit in three years

Not a recommendation — an illustration of the shape of a plan.

Notice what the structure is doing: the essential money is not the money earning the exciting rate. That is the entire discipline of the middle rung.

Frequently asked

Can I just use a bond ETF instead of a ladder?

You can, and it is simpler. The difference matters: a bond fund has no maturity date, so it has no date on which you are guaranteed a specific amount. That is fine for flexible money and wrong for a deadline.

Is 11% from a lending platform too good to be true?

Not automatically — it is the price of unsecured consumer credit risk, and someone has to be paid to take it. It is too good to be true if you cannot say who the borrowers are, what happens when they stop paying, and who holds the money if the platform fails.

What if my deadline is uncertain?

Then liquidity is worth more than yield. Stay on rung one and accept the lower rate. See Part 1.

Where does the stock market start being the right answer?

Around the point where you can genuinely leave the money alone for a decade. That is Part 3.

---

YieldNav is operated by NorwegianSpark SA (org. 834 984 172). We are not licensed financial advisers and nothing here is personalised advice. Some links are affiliate links; where a partner pays us, our editorial view is unchanged. Read our about page, editorial policy and affiliate disclosure.

Sources