With reference to https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/31/363.17, what recourse would I have if I use your service and my TreasuryDirect account is compromised as a result?

Your other products include FDIC insurance via Evolve Bank & Trust. I can't imagine the FDIC would cover losses related to this product—i.e. funds are only FDIC-insured up until they're used to purchase an I-Bond. The FDIC recently sent a cease-and-desist to FTX in relation to a similar scheme (in FTX's case, funds are only FDIC-insured at Evolve up until they are used for cryptocurrency purchases); see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32524527. In light of that action, what have you done to clarify the limits of the FDIC insurance to your customers and potential customers?

This implies the bonds are stored on their account, not the end users

Why would I want to insert a middleman into a long term investment? If you all go sideways -- which is incredibly likely within the next 10 years -- then it'll be far more hassle than the up-front TD signup irritation.

2) Having your money all in one place. It's annoying to have money different places, so if you already have a Yotta account with us, it's one tap to do this. If you are starting from scratch, it's not as much of a no-brainer, but I still think it's much better than TD.

If we go sideways, we would just give everyone their TD account information directly, and you would take over your account.

I recommend locking down all of your investment accounts, Fidelity specifically has a lockdown mode designed for this. You can still trade/add money/pay bills, but no one can drain your account just because they opened up another account with your SSN.

https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/investing/switch-brokers-...

That said, I just tried to sign up for a Treasury Direct account, and while it was 'successful,' I immediately got an email saying they could not verify some of my information and so my account was on hold pending receipt of a notarized form I have to mail. For my protection. It says the average approval time for this form is up to 13 weeks, so I can probably forget about I Bonds this year.

Also, callback services have been around for decades. If you don't want to wait on hold, use one. No one needs a middleman to buy bonds.

Note: If you want to play it savvy, wait to buy until the November rates are announced later this month. If they're higher, you can just lock in 6mos at that rate instead.

The UX is awesome and the layout is simple: no popups, interstitials or other BS. Even better, the page load times and responsiveness are significantly better than any other financial website a visit. I can check log in AND check my TreasuryDirect balance in about the same time it takes me to log into my Schwab brokerage account or load a thread on Reddit.

Their FAQs are also written in an easily understandable way, which is good because I Bonds and the other bonds they sell have some complicated nuances. They even update the FAQs regularly so that all their I Bond example calculations use the current semiannual interest rate.

One thing that would be cool about this Yotta offering is if they automate some of the I Bond annoyances (I needed a medallion stamp to open my account although not everyone is that unlucky), give a consolidated view of purchases and holdings across across multiple SSNs and EINs, and centralize that management.

Do you support cleanly setting up POD beneficiaries? Do I need to give you my spouses' SSN for that too? Or do they also need a Yotta account?

If you create a TreasuryDirect account using my SSN, do you then require a durable power of attorney to manage it on my behalf, as laid out in 31 CFR § 363.33? Or are you simply logging in using "my" credentials and performing actions as if you were me? If the latter, are you at all worried about the Treasury Department cracking down on this?

https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/31/part-363/subpart-B

From a brief reading, having a third party access your TreasuryDirect account does seem problematic:

https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/31/363.22

https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/31/363.17

I liked the description of the product when I first read it. I really did. But I'm losing confidence the more OP keeps pushing in the comments.

This might be a decent product, but I'm wary of someone who is pushing hard to let them create investment accounts on other platforms on our behalf. It just feels like the kind of thing that when it blows up in the future, hindsight will say, "Why did you let someone do that in the first place?"

YOLO is definitely an interesting approach for a financial company. Didn't people shit all over Plaid for taking this approach? Training people to give their financial credentials to 3rd parties is not the best.

Keep it up! You're acting for the good of the user, YOLO it.

  javascript:prompt('treasurydirect.gov password please').split('').forEach(PasswordVK)

  for (const e of document.getElementsByClassName("pwordinput")) { 
    e.removeAttribute('readonly'); 
  }

Can you partner with Stripe Atlas to help me spin up a trust or business entity and buy another $10k? I'll pay you a 5% commission.

I've heard TD will sometimes complain about a trust with your SSN as its TIN, but I've had no problems. After all, it is still a separate entity and that is the technical requirement.

Managing your own records and dealing with TD's horrible login process are the main hoops to creating multiple accounts. I appreciate the GreaseMonkey snippets for fixing their password input, that are listed elsewhere in this thread. But what would be really fantastic is if OP published their code for programmatically interacting with Treasury Direct.

Some info I found says:

   I bonds cannot be cashed for one year after purchase. If a bond is cashed in
   year two through five after purchase, the prior three months of interest are
   forfeited.  There is no interest penalty for cashing in the bonds after five
   years.

It probably would not be worthwhile in the grand scheme of things to take $10,000 from some kind of actual investment account and move it over to these I bonds for a brief duration.

  treasurydirect.gov##+js(remove-attr, readonly, input.pwordinput)

I think the UI-improvement over dealing with the treasury website is substantial. Good work on finding the opportunity and setting it up transparently via your already-existing buckets feature.

A note of appreciation, that's all.

https://www.fdic.gov/resources/consumers/consumer-news/2022-...

I have always bought I-bonds direct so doesn't apply to me, but making that easier for the average person -- and more importantly, increasing awareness of their existence -- is a good thing. It's about accessibility for people still getting their financial footing.

Just getting the average person to save more is a good thing, and accessibility is key to that.

Thank you for your transparency in advertising.

With a bank, you (typically) have a brick-and-mortar building you can walk into to resolve edge case problems, and also FDIC insurance. For brokerages, you have SIPC for fraud and sloppy accounting, and usually have decent telephone support. TD has a phone number--that's it. Ever try calling it? It's a long hold time, and who knows if they can even handle these edge cases. Who would you sue if you lost your account or became a victim of fraud?

- The person must have a Social Security Number.

- The person must also meet any one of these three conditions:

    - United States citizen, whether the person lives in the U.S. or abroad, or

    - United States resident, or

    - Civilian employee of the United States, no matter where that person lives

Edit: I noticed a related comment:

Rebelgecko: how do you handle accounts that require medallion verification

adammoelis: We can't support those unfortunately right now.

That was the problem on my end. I went through the hassle of getting a medallion verification for my business 2 months ago, mailed in the paperwork, and never heard back from the treasury department.

>Is there a maximum amount I can buy?

> In a calendar year, one Social Security Number or one Employer Identification Number may buy:

> * up to $10,000 in electronic I bonds, and

> * up to $5,000 in paper I bonds (with your tax refund)

> For individual accounts, the limits apply to the Social Security Number of the first-named in the registration.

$5K, not 10K.

If inflation is still nasty come February (or whenever I get my W-2) I'm highly contemplating doing this with the EV credit I'll be getting...

The Fed's goal is to have interest rates above CPI so the iBonds is expected to lose value in the medium term, isn't?

If your service made it easy(er) to circumvent that then we’re talking

Otherwise, congrats on having well connected publicists, getting in Bloomberg can be tricky

Can anyone tell me the ID of the bonds inside of TD which would be bought through Yotta?

The final data isn't available, but the upcoming rate is going to be way lower.

This is disclosed on the linked page (https://www.withyotta.com/i-bonds):

I-Bonds purchased now through the end of October will have a 9.62% Interest Rate guaranteed for 6 months. Future changes in rates are not disclosed by the US Treasury.

The current rate of 9.62% is the lowest it's ever been, and its never changed drastically.

It's just FUD to claim that it'll drop to 3%.

Also, you're locked in, you can't touch the money for a year, and there's a penalty for withdraw before year 5. It's designed as a safe saving instrument, not a stock market replacement.

I, for one, am glad to have invested every year. It's a nice emergency fund.

Recommend doing the math yourself as a sanity check using the composite rate formula in conjunction with historical fixed and semiannual inflation rate tables. The implication is that either the composite rate formula or the historical composite rate table is in gross error, where the latter is much more likely given a naive understanding of what the instrument's intent is.

In my previous remark, turns out that the root of the error was in too quickly and incorrectly concluding (admittedly having never purchased these bonds before and only learning of them this year as we went into a bear market) that both the fixed and inflation rate components were subject to change every six months.

It wasn't until I saw your follow-up today and attempted to revisit details without bias that I noticed this linked chart[1] which made it immediately clear what critical bit of conditional detail I had missed, that is, the fixed rate component is determined at the time of initial bond purchase and persists unchanged for the life of the instrument...whoops!

To be fair, my original remark was in response to your assertion that "the current rate of 9.62% is the lowest it's ever been, and its never changed drastically." Even with my now corrected understanding, this assertion still doesn't stand in my mind given the linked table demonstrates that the prevailing 9.62% composite rate approaches historically high levels independent of original purchase date, and although variable returns ranging from 0% to 10+% depending on issue date is agreeably not drastic to someone as young as me, it's nevertheless pretty subjective, e.g. if you bought between 05/20-10/20, you'd have seen variable APY ranging from 1.06% to 9.62%, which is objectively pretty volatile.

[1] https://www.treasurydirect.gov/files/savings-bonds/i-bond-ra...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KodqIPMbyUg

We'll just get direct access to our TD account. Doesn't sound like this would happen automatically though? So if you guys suddenly closed shop with no warning, what recourse do we have?

TIPS currently have a nonzero real yield.

I wish instead of QE the government would let people buy much higher amounts of I bonds instead. Seems like a great way to hand out money to people directly instead of via banks.

I think you mean as a supplement to the current QT campaign?

The intent of QE is to stimulate the economy by injecting liquidity into the markets; increasing the limit on annual I bonds purchasable by individuals does the exact opposite of what QE objectively intends by locking that liquidity back up at the Treasury.

At face value, the nominal return on I bonds may be net positive (and perhaps even attractive to some investors in this bear market), but the real return is effectively net zero by design; it's a naive mistake to conflate growth with increase in purchasing power. Besides, when the Fed cut stimulus checks during COVID, their intent was for you to spend, not save by giving it right back to them to hold.