You can (very easily) check the value of savings bonds online as the article says. The lady at the bank didn't need to "process" them to check their value. I would complain to corporate, like now. That's a lot of money that lady helped you lose.

@italianscallion33: Absolutely. At least complain to the branch manager. I used to work at a bank and if one of our tellers had done that, there would have been serious repercussions.

So why didn't you Google this in the first place?

Joke post should be removed. Bank of America gets a lot of hate but I haven't had any issues whatsoever.

@ianmac47: He probably assumed that a person who works at a bank and handles bank-related things all day would at least know a few things about savings bonds.

Which turned out to be a poor assumption to make.

If you go to the US Treasury Website, there is a piece of software called the Saving Bond Wizard located here -> [www.treasurydirect.gov]

It automatically downloads the newest pricing information and allows you to enter each of your savings bonds and lists specific information such as interest accrued, yield %, and final maturity date among other things. I recommend that if you have savings bonds, to get this software to keep track of them.

Here is my problem with this story. First off, yes BOA should know the procedures for savings bonds and know they can be looked up online before cashing them. As a bank employee myself, if somebody was to know as little information as that teller, id be fired. Secondly, as the submitter of the story, was i waiting to pay tuition until the last day that i didnt have time to research a bogus answer as 'we dont know the procedures'? I mean come on, the bonds could have been worth 500$ for all he knew. Was it worth the risk of being misinformed yourself and just shooting into the dark hoping it was enough?
Maybe im partial to the submitter not doing his part because i work in a bank. Yes..i know, the bank was wrong in what happened, BIG TIME WRONG. Could have cost a customer a lot of money. But who goes into a situation involving that much money without information, and taking a shot in the dark that it was enough.

there's no reason a bank teller shouldn't know how to handle EE bonds. since it seems none of them knew how to handle these, i'd say there's a serious problem with their training program or hiring process. one bad teller can happen anywhere, but for the whole branch to be incompetent is pretty disconcerting

@KreativeHitman13: Oh, and im not a BOA employee before that hate wagon rolls in.

@ianmac47: Silly OP, thinking that the people at the bank should know something about money...

The X-Files tagline is particularly relevant in these surreal, Wall St. bailout, money-grabbing times.

"Trust No One."

I hate to say "blame the OP" but once you're talking about finding out the value of any investment worth > $7500, you better believe I'm going to check the current value, recheck the value, and then do the process all over again, just in case. I feel like this is the equivalent of taking your used car to a dealership and having them tell you they can't tell you how much they're giving you until after you've signed it over. And you better believe I'm checking out cars.com, Edmund's and Kelly Blue Book online all before I try to decide which car dealership to go to.

@steveliv: Also, if oyu sign up for an account, you can convert your paper bonds into electronic (ie no need to keep the paper certificates). It's a relatively painless process, and you don't have to worry about keeping tabs on the paper certificates.

@KreativeHitman13: "The bank was wrong ... but the OP IS STILL AT FAULT!!!!"

Typical.

Bank employees know how to do their job. It wasn't HIS JOB, it was the bank employee's job! Period, end of discussion.

@strandist: False analogies suck.

I dunno, I don't think I'd talk to a front line teller about bonds anyway. They have people you book appointments with that are specialized in things like bonds and RRSPs and GICs and those sorts of things. You just have to book an appointment a week or two in advance. That way you have a 1 hour scheduled appointment with someone rather than a couple of mins with a teller. Those people have all sorts of internet access that a teller might not.

Not that what the teller did was right, if she didn't know, and none of the other tellers knew, that's when you pull out one of those financial managers from the back of the offices.

I really try to give the OP as much credit as possible, but he lost me on this one. For starters, noone MADE you do anything. You could have said, that's ridiculous and walked out. You would have had to sign them in order to deposit them and I'm quite sure noone held a gun to your head.

Come on now....did it make sense to you that there was no way to look up a bond's value?

What? This story really does not add up at all. The OP went into a bank and wanted to cash out his bonds without knowing at all what they were worth? BOA is unable to look up the value of a bond without cashing it? OP decides that he doesn't care how much they are worth and cashes them to figure it out? Then, OP complains that they were not as much as he had hoped and blames BOA. I'm not sure who to blame more for this one - each side failed above and beyond normal failure.

@katstermonster: How dare he! Everyone knows that banks only know how to fail. Then receive bailout money. Sheesh. What a muh-roon.

@ianmac47: I agree. What kind of moron relies on his financial institution for information about money, instead of asking random people on the Internet?

This is likely the first time I've done a "blame the OP". But let's put it as a positive learning experience.

The OP had the sequence of what he did backwards. Clearly, he could find out what they were worth by doing a quick Google. He should have done that *before* heading out to the bank. Then when he got to the bank and it became clear the teller didn't know what she was doing, nor did anyone else in the bank, it would serve as a renewed lesson that BoA is full of fail. Take your bonds and back out of the bank slowly and find one that know what they are talking about.

@zidan: "Bank of America gets a lot of hate but I haven't had any issues whatsoever."

Me neither!

'course I don't use BoA....

@mythago: I'd have confidence in these random people: [www.treasurydirect.gov]

Bank employees are low skilled labor. It's like relying on Best Buy for computer information.

@pattiesmart: Additionally, financial institutions entrusted with the disposition of your bonds should absolutely be the first line source of accurate information.

The idea that the customer has to equip himself with the information that the bank employee should know backwards and forwards is tantamount to having to research pet ailments lest your vet misdiagnose your dog.

In this day, you can clearly depend on no one, even a professed government certified 'authority,' to receive accurate treatment.

That said, Bank of America should be derided mercilessly for their bungling lack of training. What's next, tellers who can't calculate change?

@Kogenta: maybe my bank is different, but they certainly know how bonds work. of course i had used the calculator ahead of time, and discovered that a lot of my bonds were worth MORE than face value.

also the OP should keep his bond serial numbers and date of issue, bonds used for educational expenses are not taxable income

@zidan: Ooh! Ooh! I've had issues with them! Do I win a prize?

The bank is not there to educate the OP nor to give him financial advice. He's upset that they didn't tell him that the bonds he was selling would be worth more later? If the OP had the ability to do the research post-cashing, then certainly he had the ability to gather this information pre-cashing. The onus is solely on him.

While I am surprised that the bank could not tell the OP what the current value would be for the bonds pre-cashing, it does not sound as though the OP would have been satisfied with this. Would he really have followed up with how much would they be worth in six months, twelve months?

The bank did NOT cheat him. It gave him current value for the bonds when he cashed them. The OP needed to cash them cashed when he cashed them. He didn't have the flexibility to wait, so the fact that they increased in value later is irrelevant. Take a little responsibility - the OP didn't lose money for any failure on the banks part, but for his lack of preparation, understanding and timing. Own up.

I'm confused - how did he determine that they were worth $6500, and how did the bank determine that they were worth $4900? Where does the discrepancy come from?

Actually, the OP does have a recourse. Simply contact the Branch Manager and have the bonds rebooked to your account and the cash debited. It's basically a trade error and easily unwound.

But from the post it seems like he needed the money regardless for tuition, so I guess I am wondering if he really had a choice or not.

I don't really see the big deal here either way. Series EE bonds don't have a early redemption penalty after a five year holding period. Plus, they are issued at a 50% discount (which is they they are guaranteed to double if held to maturity) and the interest accretes in a straight line fashion, so of course he would have gotten more money had he held to maturity. And less since he redeemed early. But only to the extent of the missed interest.

I don't want to let the bank completely off the hook, but they are actually pretty uncommon debt instruments for a bank to see because most people buy and redeem them at treasurydirect.gov. But for the bank to give erroneous information is unacceptable.

@zidan: Are you serious? That's your response?

@Cant_stop_the_rock:
ETA: the link in this article calculates the value of a 15 year old $5000 EE bond at $4644

@Cant_stop_the_rock:

Oh I see - he got $4900 for the first one and $6500 each for the other two. So he ended up with ~$18k when he only needed $12,500, and he's mad that he cashed out the $4900 savings bond.

I think he'd be a lot better off putting that money somewhere other than a savings bond, honestly.

@morlo: No, it's not like relying on Best Buy for computer information. Best Buy doesn't hold your money for you and has no fiduciary responsibility to you. They are not a financial institution regulated by the government. Best Buy is a retail outlet. You don't ask Best Buy to hang onto your paycheck for you, I hope?

As for low-skilled labor, you don't have to be skilled at all to read a Treasury booklet or your bank's manual on handling savings bonds.

@pattiesmart:

Seems like a pretty good analogy to me--when someone tells you they ahve ton deposit it before they can tell you what it's worth, common sense tells you to run away.

@KreativeHitman13: I've worked for banks, and I've never, ever worked at one that said if we gave the customer wrong information, it was his fault for not checking up on our answer ahead of time. It was made 110% clear to us that at all times, our customers TRUSTED US with THEIR MONEY and we had an absolute obligation to honor that trust.

Maybe your bank sees things different. Can you please let us know which bank you work for? Because I'd really rather not do business with Bank of Blame the Customer.

@mythago:
But apparently, it proved to be too specialized a task for these bank employees to accomplish. Seriously, when people (like me) say he should have Googled it, we're saying Google an authroitative source of info--like, say, the US Treasury.

@Kogenta: I was a bank teller back in the old days, before all this newfangled Internet stuff. We were most certainly trained on how to cash EE bonds and how to look up the current value of the bond.

@fantomesq:

They did "cheat" him in one sense--the teller said the only way she could determine the value was to cash it. Now, that may be true for /her/ but it's misleading at best. Now, RTFA--he lost out on the $70 in interest he would have gained when cashing in the bond for /next/ semester's tutition.

@treimel: They didn't cheat him at all. He, as the investor, makes the call on when to cash out the investment. HE decided to cask it out when he did even though he KNEW that hew wasn't well informed. That is risky and he assumed the risk. Just because HE could have waited to partially cash out ntil next semester does not in any way make this the Bank's failure. He needs to take personal responsibility for his choices. The loss of opportunity of $70 is no one's fault but his own.

Much like the OP, I used savings bonds to finance a good portion of my college expenses, and I find that it's hit or miss when it comes to the banking tellers on their knowledge of savings bonds. I've had good tellers who know how to work with them, and then I have had tellers who haven't handled a bond for a long enough period of time that they have to request help to remind them how to process them correctly.

It's a good idea to use the calculator to value your bonds before going to the bank. I've had BofA and Wells Fargo both screw up redeeming my bonds because they only applied the face value of the bonds and not the actual amount, which amounted to shorting me several hundred dollars.

Also, make sure your bank sends you a 1099 for the savings bond interest after January 30 the next year because you have to list the interest on your taxes. I had BofA screw up and not report some savings bonds redeemed as savings bonds, so I never got the form. that could have gotten me in deep with the IRS if I wasn't paying attention.

@Hanshiro: Next??

@korybing: It's unfortunate that we can't make that assumption, isn't it? Banks are only interested, lately, in hiring people who can sell checking accounts/loans/CCs, not people who actually know anything about banking.

@craptastico: I work at one of the largest CU's in the country. The things employees don't know would blow your mind. As in all other areas of business, Consumerists have to protect themselves.

@fantomesq:

Yes, agrred on all points, except you said in your first post "The OP needed to cash them cashed when he cashed them," and that's just false. Also, he knew /he/ wasn't well informed, but it's not entirely unreasonable to place some reliance on the professionalism of the institution empowered to cash the bods. I agree, he placed way, way too much on the bank teller's shaky knowledge, and he definitely should have checked things out himself--but let's be clear: the teller told him a direct falsehood.

Consider the $70 an "idiot tax" charged to you for expecting a teller at a bank to be able to do anything more than simple math.

The teller was pretty dumb, but the OP was even dumber and through mutual ignorance this person probably came out ahead.

"Maturity" isn't really relevant to savings bonds anymore. They accumulate interest for 30 years. There hasn't been a penalty for cashing 1993 bonds in since 1998. So the the OP has potentially lost 14 years of interest. Big whoop.

By cashing the bonds in now, for education purposes, the OP's interest earnings will be either tax deductible or tax free. Since the government is essentially bankrupt, taxes are likely to be far higher in 2023, and the OP is unlikely to be paying tuition.

Either way, the tuition bill is paid, and the OP hasn't taken out a student loan to "save" some interest.

@Cant_stop_the_rock:

Savings bonds for the early 90's paid pretty good interest. Do you really think that someone this ignorant should be invested in anything other than savings bonds and CDs?

@pattiesmart: Financial aid at my school surprised me in a similar way. I revised (upped) my loan amount about a year ago for that semester, and the unsubsidized loan went through almost immediately, but the subsidized one wasn't going through. I went in twice and asked why, and they said it was just processing time. I asked them if they were sure I was getting the money, and they said yes. Turns out I was not approved for the money because my grad school tuition scholarship had not been accounted for till halfway through the semester. The finaid "advisors" didn't know to check for that, which turned out to be a common problem.

Yet again, someone who is being PAID to know these things doesn't know them and screws the consumer.

@pattiesmart: I consider being knowledgeable of anything that affects me financially "my job" Yeah it's a pain in the butt, but not as much so as having stuff like this happen and having to clean it up afterward.