Episode Details

Did your grandparents give you savings bonds for high school graduation and you don't know what to do with them?

On the latest episode of PennyWise, host Nat Cardona talks with Chanelle Bessette of NerdWallet about the article: Ask a Nerd: How do I cash in a savings bond? 

Nerdwallet explains how and where to cash in a savings bond, what documents you need to do so and how to check the value and see if it's worth it.

Before you run to the bank, make sure you do your homework. 

About this program

Nat Cardona is host of PennyWise as well as Lee Enterprise's true-crime podcast Late Edition: Crime Beat Chronicles. Lee Enterprises produces many national, regional and sports podcasts. Learn more here.

Episode transcript

Note: The following transcript was created by Adobe Premiere and may contain misspellings and other inaccuracies as it was generated automatically:

Welcome to Pennywise, a Lee Enterprises podcast. I'm your host, Nat Cardona. Dust off your old savings bonds. It might just be time to give them another look. We have Nerdwallet personal finance writer Chanel Bessette with us today to guide us through the process of cashing in, saving smart, talking about the world of cashing savings bonds. It's usually one of those things you have a stack of.

If you're lucky enough, they're in an envelope. They're in a box and probably haven't been dusted off in a very long time. So what's the first thing you want to know when you grab them? Look at them and say, Hey, they're ready to be cashed? What do you do first?

The age of them definitely matters because once they're past a certain age, they've stopped earning interest. So you are potentially facing that opportunity cost of losing money by keeping them as paper. Paper bonds instead of cashing them. So looking at the age first and foremost is great. If you haven't looked at them in a long time, if you've had them for a long time, it is likely that you're not facing any kind of penalty by withdrawing early.

But that is something to consider if you did get a savings bond recently. So so let's say it's the former and that you do have that old savings bond. Cashing it out is going to be a great opportunity for you to have a little windfall or a big windfall, depending on how much the bond was. And then you can take that money and reinvested.

Use it for a purchase that you want to make or just use it to beef up your emergency bond and have it as liquid cash so that you can use it for more day to day conveniences and needs.

All right. And physically, when you're like, okay, this is good to go, these guys are ready to be cash. Do you go to your bank? Where do you go for this?

So it's important to reach out to the bank in advance to make sure that they can, in fact, cash it. Not all major banks do. So you want to maybe call around at first and make sure that you know which bank is actually going be able to accept it. If you have an electronic savings bond, then you'll go to the U.S. Treasury website and cash it there.

Okay. Quick question about the physical savings bonds. Ironically or coincidentally enough, my husband had found a stack of them literally a week ago. They were good to go. So we were like, okay. And didn't realize it kind of looks like a check on the back that you would endorse, fill in that kind of thing. I did read something on one of these Nerdwallet articles that you actually aren't supposed to fill that out before heading to the bank, correct?

Correct. Do you want to wait until you are at that moment of reimbursement? You probably want to follow along with whatever banker is working with you, whatever custome