For one thing, the government has a form for bonds that have been Lost, Stolen or Destroyed to be recovered and reissued. This totally was left out, making one think if you lost a bond it was gone forever. There’s also a great resource web site located at SavingsBonds.com were you can learn all about savings bonds. There must be at least 100 pages of information.

Also, SavingsBonds.com has this great tool, The Bond Guru, that you can enter your bonds into, with the 7 day free trial so you can see exactly how much they’re worth with a color-coded report AND track your bonds every month automatically with an email. Its really teriffic for staying on top of your savings bonds!

Best of luck!

You omit all mention of T-bills, which lately have had better discount rates that are much closer to the rates offered by HYS accounts and CDs (and sometimes even higher). There are other Treasury Securities besides just I-bonds and EE bonds. You can even get T-bills that have a 28-day period, and can be bought in $1,000 increments. These can often be used like very short-term CDs, laddered, and invested in whenever their rates at auction (taking into account any tax benefit) are beating the rates offered by bank accounts or CDs.

You gloss right over the tax benefits of savings bonds, which can be HUGE if you are in a state, unlike SD, that does have high state taxes.

Bonds and T-bills are only slightly less liquid than a bank account, and probably more liquid than a CD. You omit mention of the fact that you can sell most government bonds at auction before the maturity date if you really need to get your money out of them early. And like I said, T-bills are offered that only lock up your money for 28 days.

You omit much mention of TreasuryDirect, which allows you to buy, transfer, and hold government bonds in entirely electronic form. Paper bonds are really going to be a thing of the past soon; this fixes your objection based on people losing the bonds (although I’m pretty sure there are also ways you can get credit for a lost paper bond if you can prove you were the owner). And anyway, some of the disorganized people financially are who something like a government savings bond would be good for, since they might be less tempted to spend the money in it.

Finally, from what I understand, Treasury Securities are a good way to get around the FDIC insurance limits on large cash accounts. The government will only insure your money up to a certain point in a regular bank account, but you can get a lot more insured if you put it in Treasury securities. That’s one reason why a lot of corporations that have to manage billions of dollars in short-term, relatively liquid cash use T-bills.

I’m not trying to bash on you here, but your advice above is far from universal. It may not make sense to buy government securities for one specific person, but there are plenty of other times that it does make a ton of sense (especially at times when the rates at auction are going for higher than most bank accounts).