Helping my already retired mother convert from 100% CDs to a mix of CDs and Dividend stocks. Looking for suggestions.

Discussion

My moms parents were always super conservative, bonds and CDs for investments, so that's what she has been doing. She collects a little social security but not much since she was almost always a stay at home mom while i was growing up. Until recently she worked for a little extra income and really to socialize, but she is now retired.

With inheritances she has received she has about ~$500,000 and has been opening CDs at 50k each and staggering them. She uses the gains for a little extra income, she has no mortgage to cover and her boyfriend still works for another couple years, they arent married. I convinced her to let me open an account for her and so far get $15k into it. I have her in SCHD, JEPI, and SPYI evenly split with 1k in ULTY (dont hate me!). I wanted to use the ULTY distributions to feed into the other more traditional funds thinking i can boost their growth a bit assuming ulty goes for at least long enough to recoup that 1k and then some. As her CDs mature and she cashes them out we peel 5k off and add to this account, and she seems comfortable building this to 50k for now one matured CD at a time. I'd like her to be more at like 40% in dividends but we're going with what she's comfortable with.

Im hoping I can get some suggestions for her since everything I was able to find were posts about people looking to retire in X amount of years not what to do with a chunk like this and currently retired. I appreciate any and all suggestions and apologize if I missed a popular post that addresses this type of situation already.

Posted Aug 8, 2025, 5:03 PM UTC

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