BASE UNITS

If it were 1945, and you picked up the bakelite receiver from your phone and spoke into the wall-mounted mouth-piece, and asked the operator to connect you to your savings bond broker, and he put down his slide rule and answered your call, he would give you the value of your bonds using a sheet telling him the values of savings bonds in $100 units.

To this day, sheets are still printed with values listed in $100 units. Likewise, online info is given by the government in units of $100. Except when it’s in units of $50. Or $25 like in the file you’ll download. Or when Quicken is doing it, in which case the unit is 1/10 of whatever bond you have...

Economists assume we are all used to how it was in 1945 and that we think of our $100 bonds as 1 share. Economists then have programmers make programs that are only convenient to people who remember 1945. For instance quicken. The programmers then write the help files, and sometimes get them dead wrong, and leave them dead wrong since 1995, like Quicken. Don’t follow them.

Anyway, use whatever base unit you want and leave the computing to the computer -- I hear they’re good at that.

DOWNLOAD VALUES:

Download the latest "Savings Bond Value File" in a screwed-up format from

CONVERT VALUES:

This program then makes files in the format:

Ticker, Value, CurrentDate

ENTERING SAVINGS BOND INFO IN QUICKEN:

If using quicken, remember to name each bond uniquely and give it a "ticker" in the form of yyyymmt (t=type) i.e. 200111I or 199907EE. If you already named your bonds but didn’t give them tickers, you’ll find you can’t edit them. However, if you go to the portfolio section and right click, then you can.

IMPORTING PRICES INTO QUICKEN:

If using 1999 quicken, follow these instructions. If using 2001 quicken, from the saving bond account click portfolio, click file->import->import_prices and type the full path of the file (no browsing... convenient, eh? Slowen is good like that)