This is a YouTube video titled "What Is Treasury Direct?" containing an English monologue explaining the TreasuryDirect website, its purpose for buying US government securities like Treasuries and savings bonds, the user experience challenges, and personal usage details. The speaker discusses the benefits and drawbacks of using TreasuryDirect and their own investment approach involving multiple accounts and Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities (TIPS).
We were going to talk about TreasuryDirect. Now what is TreasuryDirect? Well, TreasuryDirect is a website run by the US government. If you go to TreasuryDirect.gov you'll see all about it. And you can log into this and buy investments directly from the US government. So what investments can you buy from the US Government? For the most part, we're talking about buying Treasuries. Whether they're nominal Treasuries or Treasury inflation protected securities, I.e. tIPS, you can buy them directly from the US government there. You can also buy savings bonds, whether they are the EE bonds or the inflation linked I bonds. In fact, that's really, really the only way anybody's buying I bonds these days. It used to be you could buy them with tax return kind of money and get with your refund, you could get some I bonds. People don't really do that anymore. So if you want to buy I bonds, you go and open a TreasuryDirect account. What you need to recognize though is that the US Government is not very customer service focused. I think is probably the nice way to put this. This is not an awesome website to use. This is not an awesome agency to deal with. You know, I hear people complain about the customer service experience of Vanguard a lot and they're like, oh, Fidelity treats me better or Schwab treats me better. Well, if you want to look make Vanguard look like a rock star, go open account to treasurydirect. I mean, people get locked out of these accounts for months because it's just relatively easy to screw things up. You put your password in there wrong and all of a sudden you got issues. So it does have its issues. The benefit is you can go there and you can buy not only securities like TIPS and nominal Treasuries directly as well as those savings bonds. But there's no expense, right? You can buy all this stuff with no expense ratio, no commissions, nothing. So that's kind of the benefit of doing it. So we actually have three treasury direct accounts. We have one in my name, one in Katie's name, and then one in the name of our trust. And we bought I bonds in all of them. We also have Treasuries in one of them. We bought some individual TIPS there. As we've talked about the complexity of our financial situation, we've decided maybe this is not such a great idea to have three additional financial accounts, not to mention be buying tips in two different ways, both through an etf. We typically use the Schwab ETF with ticker schp but also to own them individually. Not necessarily a totally specified ladder, but we own some five to ten year individual tips and.
