Assessing Your Value with a Savings Bonds Calculator

If you want to calculate what your savings bonds will cost or will be worth, here’s a savings bonds calculator as well as some helpful definitions.

First of all, you may be wondering, what is a U.S. savings bond? When you get to the bottom of it, it’s a loan that you make to the government under the agreement that you will be paid back with a fixed rate of interest over a fixed period of time. That means that you are lending money to the U.S government.

So how much should you pay for purchasing these U.S. savings bonds? Bonds have a "face value". This is the nominal value of the bond, but is not necessarily what you pay to buy it. There are different reasons for this. One of them is in the marketing of the bonds. When the price is presented as a "discount", it may make the bond seem more attractive to purchasers. For US savings bonds, the price you pay is in fact half of this face value. To take an example, for a face value of $100,00 you actually pay $50,00.

Now it’s time to calculate the value of such savings bonds. It’s important also to note sometimes the Treasury Department in the U.S. government changes how calculations should be done. Purchasing an EE bond after May 1st 2005 means that the interest will now remain fixed for the life of the bond. However, bonds that were issued before this date may see their interest rates change every six months, in accordance with the policies that were defined before.

Time for our savings bond calculator. Let’s see how long it will take for the value to reach the real face value of a U.S. savings bond. The problem is that the market rates for these treasury bonds can vary. This can make it impossible to tell when the real maturity dates will fall. When the market rates move up, the bond matures that much more quickly. As a general rule, however, expect that an EE bond will not take more than twenty years to reach maturity and its face value.

Concerned that you won’t be able to calculate? Don’t worry! A free software program is now available from the U.S. Treasury Department which will do this calculation and keep track of your bonds for you. It’s called a "savings bond wizard". Using this you can also find out the current redemption value, the interest that you have earned, the interest rates and much more.

That’s not all. If you want a choice, you can also use one of the readily available tools on the Internet. Make sure that you use a reputable site for this and as an added safety measure, don’t forget to activate the right protection levels on your PC whenever you connect to the Internet for this. You may be able to download the tool or use a savings bonds calculator online directly on the web site to find out more about the value of your U.S. savings bonds.