One of the biggest things that make or break an Options Collar is what expiration month to buy for your calls and puts.
I have tried many different options month but most of them don't work out.
However, I found which one really works.
As you know, option has many expiration months, ranging from 30 days to 2 years out.
Not all months are available at the same time for liquidity reason.
Usually, the nearest month and the month right after that are always live together.
The market makers will decide for add in other months later.
The first thing to give in mind is DON'T use LEAPS options because it has no gamma and too much theta to work through.
And good choice is to only use 30-days and 60-days for your options collar.
Why? 30 and 60-days are always available.
Short-term options as such will reduce your loss when you are wrong and increase your profit when you are right.
What happens if you use further months is that when the market goes down you will lose more money than money made when it goes up.
Market crashes very fast but takes much longer to go up.
You want to take that market character into account and make it work for you.
Recently, there has been even shorter term options (like 7, 14 and 21 days) for some stock like Apple (AAPL) and S&P500 ETF (SPY).
You need to test for yourselves if you are comfortable with how fast it expires.
I personally will stick with the 30 days options.