That money, then, would be used to bolster allocations to fixed-income investments. Yet market analysts note that with 10-year Treasury securities now yielding just 1.7 percent, bonds are about as richly priced as they’ve been in decades.

So should investors use discipline and stick with their plans, even if that means buying bonds they think are expensive? Or should they adhere to the lessons of the last decade by refusing to buy investments they consider overpriced? Just as there’s no right answer about how often to rebalance — studies are inconclusive about whether it’s better to do this quarterly or annually — financial planners and market analysts say that no single answer suits all investors.

Instead, there are several basic options.

The first strategy is to stay the course and rebalance if your portfolio is out of whack — just tweak the types of bonds you buy. Mark R. Freeman, chief investment officer at the Westwood Holdings Group, notes that the primary rationale for rebalancing is to manage the overall risk of a portfolio. Just because investors are wary of bonds is no reason to let their portfolios become overexposed to equities, which are likely to lose far more value than bonds in a market correction.

Harold R. Evensky, president of Evensky & Katz Wealth Management, agrees. “The idea is to maintain your investment policies, but to adjust to market conditions,” he said. “For instance, you could always shorten your duration,” he noted, meaning that you could rebalance into bond funds that invest specifically in short-term securities, which are less likely to lose value should interest rates rise and bond prices fall.

Judith B. Ward, a financial planner at T. Rowe Price, said picking and choosing where to redeploy that rebalanced money might be fine for experienced investors who closely tracked the markets and their portfolios. For less engaged investors, though, she said there was a simpler approach: rebalance now if it seems time to do so, but just make sure that the money going into fixed income is extremely well diversified across all major areas of the bond market.