My problem is that I can't help but thinking that buying now is the worst possible time to buy stocks.
Any strategy that I could use to not have to buy all now? Does it make sense to buy all full bonds in the Taxable (not best for tax) and then sell it regularly to pick stocks every month (kind of like a dollar cost average thing) for some time : for example, I could sell the bonds and buy ~ $4500 of stocks every month during 2 years...? Any ideas?
Financial analysts are reading the headlines too, and making their recommendations accordingly. You're not the only one who's feeling tentative about the current global economic climate. That doesn't mean it makes sense to delay investing, though: you should only do that if you think you have some sort of information advantage compared to the financial industry, such that you know that their predictions for the future aren't conservative enough. If you don't know that, then you have no reason to think that the financial world is not worried enough and that the market is overvalued right now. Make sense?
2. General question - maybe a stupid question... sorry about that. Why is growth of a portfolio often associated directly with the amount of stocks it has? I mean if someone had very good high-yield bonds (5% and up) only, wouldn't the re-invested dividends provide enough growth?
5% is only a 2% real return, while stocks have consistently averaged about 8% over the last 130 years, a 5% real return. That means that stocks are doing 2.5 times as much for your 'stache, so to speak. To do much better than 5% in bonds, you'd have to be hand-choosing some really risky ones, which would expose you to additional risk from poor diversification. Even a single default or bankruptcy would more than tank your results for a year, unless you were investing in more than 20 of them. On top of that, picking yourself would expose you to more brokerage fees.
3. When I will be in need of the money from my taxable account (in 10 years), is it the strategy to sell all stock funds and buy only high yield bonds that provide the dividend to live on?
No. You need your stache to continue providing value to you throughout your entire retirement, and to do so it has to be growing significantly faster than inflation. A 2% real return is not going to cut it; the idea is that you're living on the difference between the return and inflation, and you'd need a lot more assets to cover all your needs at a 5% return (which is only a 2% real return) than at a 7-8% return (which is more than twice as big a real return). MMM's got a great blog post on the matter about the
4% rule to get you started.