What I've been doing with my money these last few years is saving through the year to be able to dump the max I can into my Roth on January 1 each year. I also keep adding extra instead of spending it.
I started looking at everything I have going on in my life and where I am with my different accounts, too. I already have my rainy day fund and house down payment fund. I also have general spending in there for the car. So I thought to myself, why should I put this bonus money into a 1% savings account when I already have my Roth covered for the next year? I could just as easily put it into AT&T and with no capital gains in the stock price make 5% on the money. AT&T could go down 3% and I'd still make more than if I had it in savings.
So that's what I did. Only I looked at the long term charts and picked Hasbro and General Mills over AT&T. Lower dividend payments but the long term charts for both kill AT&T by a huge margin. I got lucky that I had put this extra money into the account only recently so I wasn't waiting around for this to occur. I'll take a simple 2-3% drop in price and feel like I've won the lottery any day.
I just wish I could add more money to my Roth because I have some good companies in there, JNJ and MO for example, that I would have liked to be able to add to but oh well.