I-Bonds Discussion Thread (continuation of the FW thread)

Gifting I bonds for future years. Nothing new to us here, but a good recap

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I am facing interesting dilemma now if fixed rate starting November will be close to 1%. I have some old paper I-bonds that are 5+ years old with 0.0-0.2% fixed. As they will be running out of 9.62% it may be worth to cash them all and repurchase as gift. Only downside - they will be locked for 2+years, as we already maxed out gifts for 2023 and 2024, adding those will max out 2025-27

Will see next week what fixed rate is, if any at all. After that will need to figure out how to execute most efficiently.

Anyone else will be looking into such flip?

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thx for recap. Does the .gov site track gift max/yr or do I have to?

What makes you think that there’s a non-zero chance of this happening?

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Real yield of TIPS, and feds fail to tame inflation so far. Will see…

Is there any evidence to suggest that the fixed rate of I-Bonds is related to any of that? We just had a short discussion just upthread about how the fixed component is set, and all I found was that it’s entirely up to the Secretary of the Treasury.

My guess is that demand for I-Bonds is higher now than ever before, and there’s no reason whatsoever to increase the fixed rate.

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I’d say that argues for the opposite. Inflation continues to allow the IBond rate to beat market rates, they dont need to suppliment it to keep the bonds competitive.

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Treasury is telling people they have to buy iBonds by 10/28 to get the old rate, and now the TD website is crashing. There must be a lot of media coverage of this high rate…

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I received an email from TD this morning letting me know there is a message in my inbox. I can’t access the site to read my message as it’s taking forever. Wondering if anybody else got this email? If so, could you share whether it was something benign?

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I got that message also! It is also the reason I was trying to log in. Perhaps they crashed their own server by sending that message to everyone. :rofl:

I am guessing the message is something mundane, like “we are having server issues, sorry”. :upside_down_face:

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Thanks. I was getting worried.

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That is correct. You need one business day after the day you buy for them to process it and you get that processing date. Monday 10/31 will be processed on 11/1 and miss the old rate.

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Did you schedule any purchases or reinvestments for today? It’s probably a confirmation of your purchase. Last week I scheduled I-Bond purchases for today and the money left my funding account this morning (phew! :sweat_smile: ). I also have T-Bills reinvesting into today’s auction (issued on Tuesday). Got the email, but haven’t looked at the message.

Also LOL message on TD:

I bet a lot of those are newly minted trust accounts. That’s the smart move.

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I was finally able to login this evening. Nothing to worry about. I had requested a “reinvestment” on an expiring T-bill. The message was just that notification.

Their site has been dead for days now.

How do you like buying T-bill on TD vs say Fidelity, Etrade etc? I think their site access/interface sucks but will deal with it if rates are better or other pros?

You didn’t ask me, but I will answer also. Fidelity had cryptic warnings that they only allowed 100k wires so I did not want to deal with that. Lost a customer at least for this situation. Treasury will dump the money same day into Alliant and I can wire it wherever I want with no limits.

There are some minor differences. For example, of late E*Trade has a minimum $8k T-bill purchase requirement… or at least that’s what it shows to me. TD doesn’t have that limitation.

Another good point for TD is that you can place orders weeks and months ahead of auctions. I don’t see that option with Fidelity or E*Trade.

Also, at least for me TD has worked great up until today. My guess is that lots of folks accessed the site to place orders before the deadline, causing something akin to DoS.

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The Treasury doubled its server capacity in an effort to address the outages, a Treasury Department spokesman said. The system experienced some moments of slow performance and was briefly unavailable, the spokesman said.

People continue to have difficulty accessing and logging on to the site.

“Due to unprecedented requests for new accounts, we can’t guarantee customers will be able to complete a purchase at the current 9.62% rate by the Oct. 28 deadline. The TreasuryDirect system has been, and continues to, process the payments that have been completed,” a spokesman said.

If a customer receives a confirmation that their purchase has been made or completed then the payment will be processed, a spokesman said.

This isn’t the first time the website crashed due to high I Bond demand. The TreasuryDirect website experienced outages on May 3, a day after the 9.62% rate was announced.

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That didn’t really inspire confidence in me that when I need to wire money out perhaps over a year from now I would be able to do it. So I just used TD.