I want to buy a treasury bill seeing as how the interest rate is 5%. If I want to bid myself I know I have to get an account with the treasury. What's next? after that?

Another, easier, alternative. Take the money and buy the equivalent in either Pfizer (PFE) or Verizon (VZ) stock.

Pfizer (PFE) is currently paying 5.94%. There are no brokerage fees anymore. You can buy or sell at a moments notice. PFE is beat-down considerably. https://finance.yahoo.com/news...tocks-121500133.html Analysts are predicting a 13% upside in the next 12 months.

Verizon (VZ) is paying 6.74%. VZ has raised it's dividend each of the last 17 years. Analysts are projecting a 12% increase in share price over the next 12 months. https://finance.yahoo.com/news...-t-vs-113000836.html

Both PFE and VZ are well known, stable companies. Neither is going to make you rich, but both will give you good passive income.

Consider the use of a broker. For minimal fees you can buy AND sell treasuries in $1,000 face amount multiples. You decide maturity, etc on the basis of posted yields and your needs.

I understand that now the maximum amount of cash that can be deposited in the bank without being reported to the FBI has been reduced to $600.00. Not that I have anything to hide + as a rule, I never like to deposit cash; it still seems a bit beyond their purview.

quote:

Originally posted by Norman Conquest:
I understand that now the maximum amount of cash that can be deposited in the bank without being reported to the FBI has been reduced to $600.00. Not that I have anything to hide + as a rule, I never like to deposit cash; it still seems a bit beyond their purview.

Jeez, that's about six tanks of diesel fuel for a pickup truck.

Kind of nosy of them...

My thoughts exactly.

I don't believe that $600 figure went into play. I believe it was the IRS instead of the FBI.

I believe the wording is something like: The IRS would collect the total sum of deposits and withdrawals from bank accounts with more than $10,000 in non-payroll income. Recipients of federal benefits like unemployment and Social Security would be exempt.

Well, when you put an additional 100,000 IRS agents on the payroll, I suppose that you need to find something for them to do.

Treasuries are easy to deal in if you work with someone like Fidelity. They broker your bids at auctions by combining your requests lumped with all interested investors. I suspect all the major houses have a similar system to do this. CD's are similar. They contract huge blocks of CD's from everybody issuing with the best rates and sell to their investors in increments of $1000. No way you could take the time and effort to contact all the banks and the Feds and identify all the available paper by yourself.

quote:

Originally posted by Norman Conquest:
Well, when you put an additional 100,000 IRS agents on the payroll, I suppose that you need to find something for them to do.

They had to do something. During Covid, I went through two tax cycles with no return processed and they owed me thousands in refunds. This was compounded by the fact that I was denied the Covid payments because I had no completed tax returns. I was having to file paper returns at the tine because atthe time farm returns cound't be filed electronically. It would sometimes take six weeks between calls to get back in touch with an agent. Slowly, in talking periodicaly and doing a lot of research I found that the average for processing a paper return was in the multi-year range and growing. The root of the problem was that the IRS had something like 13 major processing software packages spread over many different departments that had been developed independently and did not communicate with each other. Every time a form had to be passed to a different division, section or whatever it had to be re-input by someone. I had letters claiming I was an alien, my wife was dead, my wife was a man etc.

I finally gave up and contacted our confressman Andy Barr and detailed the situation. He had one aide dedicated to constituent problems. I talked to him, provided documentation of my problems, the IRS ridiculous letters, my phone records and my tax forms. About four weeks later I recieved five checks in one day for two years tax returns and 3 Covid payments.

I later read news articles that indicated that congress was really on a tear with IRS over this issue (not for concern for the taxpayers but because the revenue stream to pay for Biden's programs was falling way behind). In the last year their service has improved dramatically. I believe they took a lot of the money earmarked for new agents and spent it on updating the software infrastructure to cut out huge amounts of needless agent time.

I'm glad to hear that you were finally taken care of.

quote:

Originally posted by Art S.:
Treasuries are easy to deal in if you work with someone like Fidelity. They broker your bids at auctions by combining your requests lumped with all interested investors. I suspect all the major houses have a similar system to do this. CD's are similar. They contract huge blocks of CD's from everybody issuing with the best rates and sell to their investors in increments of $1000. No way you could take the time and effort to contact all the banks and the Feds and identify all the available paper by yourself.

Barriers to market entry? And you could end up like Silicon Valley Bank if you had a sudden need for a large volume of cash.

That would be the bank's problem. The beauty of institutional CD's is that the big financial houses contract for millions of dollars of issues at the highest rates. they then broker these to their investors. You, the investor, own the CD but you don't have to go through any paperwork with the bank. If you want a large amount in cash with insurance, you ladder CD's while keeping the amount in any one bank under the FDIC insured amount. By laddering and diversifying, you can go through bank closures unscathed. You are insured for each CD and the bank, not your brokerage, has the deposit limit. It actually would protect if your brokerage failed. During the last big debacle, I had somewhat north of $600,000 in failed banks and never lost on cent; even recovering my accrued interest. They posted the reimburstment within a day of the failure date. When these banks go under, the Fed forces someone that can swallow it to step up and take over. The deal is worked out between the 2 banks and the FDIC so there is an orderly transfer.