Best way to track Treasury Direct investments?

ZABA

Howdy. I recently recreated a Treasury Direct account and invested in E and I Bonds, T-Notes, T-Bills, and one TIPS. As far as I can tell, there is no way to download data from said site to Quicken.

Questions:
* Is that correct there is no automated way?
* If so, what would be the best method to enter the aforementioned investment types?

Thank you for any assistance.

P.S. In case it helps, I'm running Quicken Premier (Version R39.23) on Windows 10.

NotACPA

I don't believe that the US Treasury allows connections from Q.  Their decision.

Q Help deals with how to handle these purchases.

Tom Young

Since downloading into Quicken isn't available your only way of proceeding is via manual entries.  First, you'd enter the transfer(s) of cash you used to buy the securities into the Treasury Direct Account you've created in Quicken, then you'd go through a series of buys using the Bonds Bought action to get these securities properly entered into the Account.

You'll want to create securities for each type of bond you've purchased - Quicken will solicit that information as part of the Bonds Bought entries.  If you've done some "laddering", (purchased the same sort of bond but with different maturities), I'd create distinct securities for each maturity. 

You need to educate yourself thoroughly on how each type of bond "works" and figure out how you want to handle them in Quicken and how you want to report (or not report) interest income.  For example, the I Bonds are zero-coupon bonds, meaning you're not going to see any cash from these bonds until they mature or you sell them back to the Treasury.  However, from a "real" perspective you are earning interest every year as the bonds increase in value.  So you have various ways of handling this bond in Quicken, including entering a negative Return of Capital dollar amount each year to reflect that year's amortization (and the bond's increase in value), then making another entry in the same (positive) amount to recognize interest income, an interest income that you completely ignore - or not - at tax time.

retird

So you would need to set up an off-line Brokerage Account for Treasury Direct.... Right????

J_Mike

retird said:

So you would need to set up an off-line Brokerage Account for Treasury Direct.... Right????

That is correct.