Paper Savings Bonds are hard to find!

May 18, 2015 8:34 PM

Remember when you could walk into a bank and purchase a Series EE savings bond? As I'm discovering, the US Treasury no longer issues paper Series EE bonds, and has gone fully online.

The process to purchase as a gift for another person involves each party setting up a TreasuryDirect account, and knowing the other person's SSN. Not ideal for a gift to a non-family member.

My question - is anyone aware if there any institutions, either domestic of foreign, that still issue paper bonds in the same fashion as the US Treasury previously had?

posted by kensch to Work & Money (6 answers total)

apologies for not answering the stated question. my grandmother used to give me and my brother savings bonds. we both loved them as kids and i had hoped to purchase one for my niece's birthday. like you, i discovered that physical bonds are no longer available... almost, it seems like you can request that your tax return be paid as a savings bond. i opted to buy a silver bar instead. it turns out they are really satisfying to hold and it checked off all the boxes i was looking for in a bond. as an added bonus we will get to talk about her great great grandmother in a few years.
posted by phil at 9:42 PM on May 18, 2015

I think that Israel still offers certificates for their Israeli Bonds. A lot of them are given as bar mitzvah gifts and the like.
posted by AugustWest at 6:44 AM on May 19, 2015

You can still get paper bonds if you choose to have your tax return paid that way. I got them a couple years ago that way. (FAQ also says you can do this: https://www.treasurydirect.gov/indiv/research/faq/faqendotcpaper.htm#all)
posted by triscuit at 7:29 AM on May 19, 2015

I don't know. A while back I had a payroll savings program that every so often would mail me a paper bond. I stopped this in 2004.

You can convert the paper bonds to electronic form; there are instructions for how to do this on the TreasuryDirect website. But it sounds like you want a paper bond to give as a gift, and you want the recipient to have something physical to hold.
posted by tckma at 11:12 AM on May 19, 2015

The only way to get paper US Treasury bonds is via the tax return route. You get I Bonds that way, not the traditional Series EE, though. (Which is fine, the rate on the Series E is terrible right now.)

I would think about something else to give as a gift; savings bonds not really being the gift that they were 30 years ago when interest rates were higher.

In theory you could buy an old bearer bond on the secondary market, but I don't really know how you'd go about doing that; as far as I know there's no good market since most everybody has converted them away from pure bearer instruments as part of selling them. So unless you know somebody who owns one and would be willing to part with it directly, I don't think it's much of an option.

You can buy stock certificates for single shares (or more, but you shouldn't) of various companies, and then have them framed as display pieces. The costs are substantial, though. "OneShare" used to be the dominant place to do it, but it seems to not be operating (might be temporary maintenance, not clear). Aside from these services I don't know of any way to request physical certificates for stocks; I don't think anyone does it anymore, except as a notional thing if you're IPOing and want a "first share" to display.

Silver bars are sort of a neat idea, and might be in the right price range, but part of me does worry that they send exactly the wrong message as a financial lesson compared to a savings bond (awfully high transactional costs, not subject to compound interest, hard to redeem, uncertain return, possibly sends kid down the whole hoarding-metal rathole) but... they are neat. Plain-ish bars seem to sell for about 10-12% over the spot price with free shipping. There are discounts for buying them in quantity; if you thought this was a tradition you wanted to do for a few years, there's an advantage to buying them upfront and then just doling them out over time. 5 oz bars are sort of a nice size and would be under $100 each.

If you just want to give something that's unusual and might increase in value, and is hard for Junior to immediately liquidate and spend on silly kid stuff, you could consider foreign currency. I used to occasionally get gifts of British Pounds and it was always sorta neat to figure out how much they were worth in dollars, and also to understand that some years they might be worth more or less, depending. As a financial lesson, being Junior's first exposure to forex is probably right up there with giving him his first pack of cigarettes, but if the idea is more that he'll use them to travel later (which admittedly is a very different gift) that's sort of fun and inspirational.

Or you could just write him a check, or hell get a cashiers / bank check cut directly to him, with the idea that he'll deposit it into a savings account and decide with his parents how much to take out immediately vs. save for later. Depending on his/her age, receiving and depositing a check might be a reasonable novelty in itself, and you're not saddling them with a physical artifact in a world that is moving away from physical artifacts as value stores as fast as it possibly can.
posted by Kadin2048 at 11:21 PM on May 19, 2015

Thanks all! Very helpful in thinking this through.
posted by kensch at 8:32 PM on May 26, 2015