Setting up Bonds in Quicken

Important! For this bond evaluator to work, you should NOT set up your Savings Bonds as recomended in the Quicken documentation.

The first step is to set up securities for for each month that EE or I bonds were purchased in. You can name the securities whatever you want but their symbol must be Eyymm where yy is the year and mm is the month of the bond (use Iyymm for I series savings bonds). You only set up one security for each month no matter how many individual bonds were purchased. (Use 00 for 2000, 01 for 2001, etc.-- ie, E0002 for Feb 2000)

Here are sample screenshots from setting up a Feb 2004 EE Bond security in Quicken 2004.
Screen 1 - Screen 2 - Screen 3

Note: Use a "*" in front of the symbol for versions of Quicken before Quicken98.

Next you have to set up or use an existing investment account that will have the actual bond info. I use a separate account called Savings Bonds. There are two techniques that can be used for entering the bond information. Both are shown in the following example. In the first instance, May 1992, each bond is entered as a separate transaction. That allows you to enter the number for each individual bond. The second method, Oct 1992, shows entering all of the bonds purchased for the month in one lump sum transaction. Either will work just fine.

eebvesetup5.gif (4633 bytes)

This also shows entering the purchases in the two most common ways. Use ShrsIn if you don't want to account for the other side of the purchase. Use the BuyX method if you do.

The bonds are all set up based on units of $100 face value. That way the purchase price is always $50 (except for I bonds where it would be $100). The number of shares purchased varies depending on the bond. Some examples of face value and number of shares are: $100=1.0, $50=0.5, $5000=50.0.

Here is an example of a portfolio view of the above shown "values" in January 1997.
eebvesetup6.gif (3725 bytes)

NOTE: After you have set up your bonds, your market value may not include your original investment. This is normally caused by a non-zero cash balance. This can be fixed with the menu selection: Activities--Update Balances--Update Cash Balance.