Has anyone here bought notes or bills on Treasury Direct? Looks like there are periodic auctions. How do you enter a price that will be accepted? That part confuses me. Do you just buy $1000 of a 2 year note and get the automatic best interest yield?
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You agree to accept whatever yield is determined by auction.
https://www.treasurydirect.gov/indiv/research/indepth/tnotes/res_tnote_buy.htm
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I would not do it given how crap the website is. Buy from Schwab or Fidelity, you can get new issue bills bonds and notes, auto-roll them, and you pay no more than TreasuryDirect, and it’s all in one place nicely managed. I’m just afraid your TD account goes belly-up or gets hacked or you have to change banks, and you have no recourse.
I’ve bought them from TD. You can’t sell those notes prior to maturity. But you can if you buy from Schwab or Fidelity. With the yields now, that’s ok
If you buy a 10 year TIPS, your stuck with it for 10 years. You may have to discount the TIPS or pay a hefty fee if you sell at Fidelity or Schwab but you at least can sell these bonds. I lost about $14 on a $1,000 TIPS note but I was able to redeploy these funds to pay off an accident instead of having to sell stocks which were down 20%
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I’ll check out Fidelity. I was underwhelmed by Vanguard when I perused its brokered CDs and Treasury site so I hope Fidelity has a better interface.