Make Savings Bond Tracking Easier

dsoethout
dsoethout Member ✭✭✭
edited October 2023 in Product Enhancements
Treasury Direct provides the data files to value any US Savings Bond based upon that Savings Bond's serial number. https://www.treasurydirect.gov/indiv/tools/tools_savingsbondvalues.htm

Would like to be able to simply enter the serial numbers of the savings bonds and have quicken automatically take over the rest ... updating the values, etc. (alerts on maturity dates would be nice as well on that so +1 on that idea)
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Comments

  • NotACPA
    NotACPA SuperUser ✭✭✭✭✭
    The US Treasury would need to sign a contract with Q/Intuit for such downloads to be available.
    And I don't see that happening.

    Q user since February, 1990. DOS Version 4
    Now running Quicken Windows Subscription, Business & Personal
    Retired "Certified Information Systems Auditor" & Bank Audit VP

  • dsoethout
    dsoethout Member ✭✭✭
    edited March 2021
    The bond value files are available for download for anyone to use. They also provide the specification file to use the value file to connect the Bond serial number to the value file. It is public data. Prior link didn;t convert top html so maybe this helps ...

    https://www.treasurydirect.gov/indiv/tools/tools_savingsbondvalues.htm
  • dagger
    dagger Member
    Here is a suggestion of how I keep track of U.S. Savings Bonds in quicken. I prefer to create a security in quicken of type "U.S. Savings Bond". For the symbol of the security I use the full Serial # of the bond. I then enter a transaction to record the purchase of 1 share at the Issue price of the bond (e.g. a $100 bond is issued at $50) on the date of purchase. This allows me to keep track of the cost basis of the bond.

    To maintain the current value of the bonds, I enter all my bonds into the Treasury Direct Savings Bond price tool at https://www.treasurydirect.gov/BC/SBCPrice. The site provides instructions on how to save this page so you only have to enter them in once.

    Once you have the list of current prices from the Treasury Direct site, you can simply save the "Serial#, date, Value" into a .csv file. Then in quicken you can use File->File Import->Import Security Prices from CSV file to quickly update your prices.
  • Matthew42
    Matthew42 Member ✭✭
    @dagger Wouldn't it be great if Quicken did all that work for you? It's not like valuing a US savings bond is that complex :)