[mbhunter]

I'll assume that you can play with this $2,000, since you seem interested in generating a higher rate of return. If not, over 5% and almost completely liquid is a pretty good deal.

You can try becoming a person-to-person lender on Prosper dot com. This site has been up for several months and still might be a good deal for the lenders. I have a couple of loans that I made to AA-rated borrowers that are averaging over 10% amortized over three years.

If you were to put the $2k in there and fund loans with prudent risk, you could probably get back over $50 in payments without much problem. This is the cutoff for reinvesting; the minimum amount you can loan to somebody is $50. I'm leaving out a lot of details but you can probably achieve a rate of 7-8% without too much problem here. In any case, it might be worth checking out.

The down side to this is that your money is tied up.