Laddering

See: Sequence Risk.

Ladders have rungs. You step on them sequentially, to get to the next level. Think about your retirement. You don't know how long you're gonna live. A lifetime of wild partying has left you with a volatile ticker. So you can't afford the risk of owning stocks. Instead, you own a ton of muni bonds, but you want them to come due in blops of $25,000 every 2 months so that you have plenty of dough to send yourself out in style.

You want them laddered, regular, not in one fell swoop, so that you could potentially spend everything in a few months and end up old, destitute in a retirement home, and dreading every day remaining. Each rung on that ladder of laddering is the due date and subsequent wiring of cash money from those muni bonds into your Schwab account. So then, 6 times a year, you get a tax-free blop of 25k and you can go spend it, climbing one rung higher into that great party cloud in the sky.