TreasuryDirect

By the

way, their automated thing, for those who haven't gone through this yet, if you have a Treasury Direct account, you don't have a choice anymore.

If you want to be able to get into it, you have to do this.

You can't use their internal one anymore.

am.

Well, okay, so my decision, because I pay taxes.

I have a Treasury Direct account, so I had no choice.

I had to do this.

Here's basically how it works.

You can purchase I-bonds as a gift for your spouse or vice versa and hold them in a Treasury Direct gift box without actually delivering them until the following calendar year.

That means in one calendar year, you and your partner can each buy $10,000 in I-bonds for yourself, plus buy a $10,000 gift bond for the other person, potentially stacking $40,000 in I-bond purchases in a single 12-month window.

The gift bonds earn interest from the moment they're purchased, even while they're just sitting there in that gift box waiting to be delivered to the other person.

So take roughly half the population.

isn't in the enviable position of having enough money left at the end of the month that they've got, you know, some savings and they can, you know, log on to Treasury Direct and start buying, you know, government securities.

Most people don't have that luxury.

So we're talking about a savings vehicle, treasuries, that are available to people who already have money.

Okay.

But you can imagine in a utopia, you know, Treasury Direct has the ability that an average American can log on and get an account and can participate in a Treasury auction.

So, you know, you can imagine some perfect world where something like that exists for outright trading in Treasuries, where, you know, any Joe on the street could log on and get an account.

But today, that doesn't exist.

But what I've been saying for a few years now is if you want to sleep at night and not have the risk of being, you know, deeply into the equity market, which still has been phenomenally better than if you were in bonds.

But if you want that- guaranteed return of some type of fixed income instrument, the average person should open an account with the US Treasury at treasurydirect.gov, and there you can buy directly from the Federal Reserve short-term T-bills.

I mean, you can go way long.

You can buy bonds too, but I, my recommendation is you stay...

You can go online.

It's called treasurydirect.com. You can go online and you can buy all the different whatever you want to buy.

And you can keep them.

And then the kicker is if you decide for a year you want to buy all the bonds, you can cash them out.