Hello FutureNurse,
When you buy a bond, you are lending a company money at a certain interest rate. Usually, a higher quality company results in a lower interest rate because there is less risk of non-payment. There are a ton of different features and terms that you should learn about before you invest in a bond, most of which can be learned from a site like investopedia.com, videos on youtube, etc. The great thing about bonds is that, assuming the company doesn't default, you can expect to receive a certain amount of cash on a regular basis (majority of bonds pay out semi-annually, but some pay more or less frequently) until the bond's maturity date when you'll receive the original face of the bond.
Personally (and some may disagree), I feel like now is not the best time to invest in bonds. Interest rates are low and almost certainly heading up. Since bond prices and interest rates have an inverse relationship, I expect that any bond I buy today is going to lose value. For example, if I buy a quality $1,000 bond with a 4% coupon and a 10 year maturity today, I can probably expect to receive 4% payments every year for 10 years and then get my $1,000 back at maturity. But, what if I want to sell the bond before its maturity and market interest rates are now 6%? My $1,000 bond will be worth quite a bit less. Since rates are most likely going up in the next decade from today's historical lows, if I did buy a bond I would need to do it with no plans to sell it and be ok that in a few years I could buy bonds at higher rates or even that my bank account will pay better interest than the bond which I would then be stuck with.
Another thing to keep in mind is that, unlike dividends, bond payments are almost always going to be at a set interest rate for the life the bond. If you carefully select great dividend paying companies to purchase stock in, they should regularly increase their dividend. There are many companies who kept raising their dividend all the way through the recession. Google Dave Fish's list of Dividend Champions for a list of companies who have raised their dividend every year for the last 25+ years. And not only do the bond payments not increase, but the face value of the bond you'll receive at maturity isn't going to increase either. With thoughtful dividend investing, historically speaking I am going to benefit from increasing dividends and stock price. So, if it isn't obvious at this point, I'm a proponent of dividend investing in today's market over bond investing.
If I were going to purchase bonds today, I'd most likely do so through bond funds (like mutual funds comprised of bonds instead of stocks) with relatively short durations. Now, if you have an obscene amount of money and want to protect it and today's interest rates on quality bonds are enough to fund your lifestyle, then sure go ahead and start laddering bond purchases. But I'm definitely not in that boat!
I hope this is helpful!
