SAME AS CASH? Yeah, right. The implosion of the market for auction-rate preferred securities, or ARPS, showed that no "risk-free" investment is truly secure, no matter what your broker tells you. Couple that with recent bank failures, and income investors have been left unsure about where to park excess funds.

While understandable, the dilemma has exposed the bigger problem; namely, the bills that you carry around in your wallet are a losing proposition as long as they're in your wallet. Sure, dollars are as liquid as liquid can be, but they're dropping in value every day. You can stash your money under the mattress or bury it in a mason jar in the backyard, but inflation will wash away its value just as surely as a Mississippi flood will. The reality is that you need to get some yield on your greenbacks.

Wall Street, of course, knows this and tried to address it by peddling ARPS. Remember, these were touted as a rock solid, slightly higher-yielding alternative to sleepy old money-market funds or Treasury bonds. They simply could not fail. And yet they did, catching many a canny and sophisticated investor off guard.

"The funny thing about ARPS is that lot of ultra-high-net-worth investors are still buying them because they don't need the liquidity and they like the return," says Domenic DiPiero, president of Newport Capital Group, an investment management firm in Red Bank, N.J. "There's a buyer and a seller for everything, I guess."

That's super news for the ultra-rich. I know their money woes were keeping me up at night. Maybe one day we'll all join them now that we can stop buying Ambien by the gross.

Of course we're still going to need to earn some yield on that money we've saved on sleeping pills. And it's got to stay relatively liquid. Unfortunately, for non-ultra-richers, options are more limited and not nearly so remunerative. True, savings accounts and money markets offer little risk, but with the federal-funds rate scraping along at 2%, they offer little reward either. The ARPS fiasco showed that it's shockingly hard to get a too-good-to-be-true return on cash and most of the other options are pretty vanilla.

We did manage to find a few we like. For the average investor, short-term certificates of deposit or short-term corporate debt are really the best deals, DiPiero says. In that arena, he likes GE Capital, an arm of General Electric. For example, it offers a three-month CD at 2.85%, a six-month at 3.2% and a nine-month at 3.5%.

That's competitive with other market rates for CDs. They're also safe and short-term enough to be pretty darn liquid. "Plus, you get one of the highest-rated financial companies in the U.S.," DiPiero says. (That's critical, since they're not FDIC insured.)

If you just can't shake the money-market habit (and have absolutely no faith in the U.S. dollar), then try a foreign version. One good one is the Merk Hard Currency fund. It's essentially a very conservative foreign money-market fund that's highly diversified with a good dose of gold thrown in.

On the plus side, it has a trailing 12-month yield of 6.79%, according to Morningstar, and gets a five-star rating. On the downside, the total expense ratio came in at 1.3% as of the end of June. But there's no load on either end, and the minimum investment is a retail-investor friendly $2,500.

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Also See:

• Where to Find the Best Savings Rates

• A Summer Thaw for Frozen ARPS?

• The 'Other Cash' Crisis