Help needed buying a US Savings Bond on Treasury Direct

Factual Questions
1

I am trying to buy a US Savings Bond for a family member as a gift.

Unfortunately long gone are the days when you could go to a bank and buy a bond and have it mailed to the recipient. Now you have to do it online and the Treasury Direct website is about as user unfriendly as any I’ve encountered.

I purchased the bond earlier this month, setting up a registration for the minor recipient and a parent. You can’t actually just give the bond at that point – you have to wait for Treasury Direct to do whatever. In the meantime, the parent set up a Treasury Direct account.

So today I go to deliver the bond which was purchased as a gift to the recipient’s account. But the bond is under my registration, and I can’t change it. The only registration listed is mine, and when I click on Add Registration, it accepts all the information – but when I try to change to the registration I just added, it doesn’t appear in the drop-down box.

So what the hell do I do now??

2

You might be SOL on that.

I buy bonds every year for my nieces. My brother had to set up their accounts first then give me their info and then I had to enter it using “Add New Registration” and check “This is a gift” for their registration.

THEN when I buy a bond, I can select the registration from the “Registration” dropdown (it has my name, and one of each niece’s name) for whichever niece, and on the final page before I finish the purchase it has their name as the registration and “this is a gift.”

My mom did what you did one time (purchased without selecting the niece’s name) and I did a lot of reading up and determined that the bond can’t be transferred no way no how.

Seems like you did it in the right order but you must not have selected the kid’s registration when purchasing. You’re looking at “Gift Box” right? Regardless of what you did, if it’s not in their name, there’s no going back :frowning: