What to buy for short term?

I'm an Egyptian non US resident have an IBKR account and have some money on voo, and since june I had 15k liquid in ibkr that I wanted to buy an etf with but I'm applying for a masters in europe and would need around 15k usd as proof of funds or whatever so so they don't reject my visa.

Here is the problem, I basically lost a lot of "value" because of this, on the grand scheme of things I'm fine with that but I want to learn for the future.

Problem:

• I was worried about short term US taxes for buying and sellling
• I'm worried aboht inflation but idk how buying bonds would affect me in US taxes and does ibkr handle that for me.
• what do you recommend in these cases?

For reference, I tend to do this a lot, in Jan 2022 I had equivelent of 10k USD (my income from freelancing over the years, I was transfering to my local EGP account 1 USD = 15.5 EGP).

Then due to ukraine invasion and other reason we got fucked, now USD = 47.3 (went to 60 for a while).

That is whatever but I had planned before that to buy the local equivelent of sp500 and I'd been fine, but I didn't because I also had plans to use that money for a masters (visa got rejected late 2022 for not having enough funds)

I don't want to keep doing the same mistakes, I already did this in 2024 and 2025 too.

QUESTION For long term I should just buy VOO (plan on moving to irish voo some time on the future), but what do you suggest for things that I may or mah not liquidate within a year? I want to keep something as a safety fund that I can liquidate without much issues.

Sorey for unorganized post writing on mobile.