unofficial microsoft.public.money FAQ and A
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How to do things in Money: Investments

Q) How do I track savings bonds in Money? Tracking them as a CD doesn't seem to provide a way to track their value.

A) Money doesn't handle savings bonds particularly well. They suggest entering them as CDs and this seems like the least bad way to do so.

Many of us use the Savings Bond Wizard to know the current value of our bonds. You can transfer, by hand, interest information from the Savings Bond Wizard to Money but you will have to enter it as reinvested interest, which has other side effects including creating taxable investment income. This may be what you want--depending on your tax plans for the bond interest. If you elect to defer paying interest until maturity, you should set the tax deferred setting for the investment account holding the bond investment.

In order to keep track of individual bonds, you should create separate investments for each series/denomination/issue date of bond you hold. (E.g., "$100 EE 2002-03" could be an investment name.) Then enter the purchase price for the total number of like bonds you bought as a Buy Investment. (Say you buy 5 $100 bonds--investment name, say, "US $100 EE Bond - 2005-08"--at their $50 purchase price, you enter 250 as both quantity and value.) You might also consider storing the serial number(s) in the memo field of the buy transaction.

Thanks to Michael Gordon for an important correction to this answer.

References:
Savings Bond Wizard

Please see this disclaimer if you are using Money 2005 or this comment if you are using Money 2006.

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