6 Ways to Beat Rising Interest Rates

Even if you have been an investor for 30 years, you don't really know about high interest rates.

U.S. interest rates peaked in October 1981, when the 30-year Treasury bond traded at 15%. The dream, when I started investing later that decade, was of "hat-sized yields" of 6%-7%, which didn't become the norm until the early 1990s.

Today, interest rates are less than half that. Early in 2018, the rate on the 30-year Treasury stood around 2.7%. By mid-February, the yield on that long-term debt had spiked about 15% to around 3.1%, which is roughly where it trades today.

Investors panicked at the time, and higher interest rates still have investors worried. For good reason. After all, higher interest rates make bonds more competitive with some dividend stocks, and perhaps more importantly, they make borrowing more expensive for corporations, eating into the bottom line.

The Federal Reserve has already raised its benchmark rate once this year, is about to do so a second time and is expected to hike interest rates once or even twice