Do people still buy savings bonds?

I don't know, but my wife's grandmother and great-aunt used to buy them for her when she was a kid. A few years after we were married my MIL found them in her closet and gave them to us. It was about $10k worth. Nice little surprise.

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I still have I-bonds that I bought during the pandemic. Well actually, I sold those and bought new I-bonds last year as they had a positive fixed real interest rate.

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Same.

We bought EE Savings Bonds for years on payroll deduction. Some have hit 30 years, when they quit accruing interest. I was able to cash all the older ones at Origin Bank, but most banks no longer fool with them. The alternative is filling out a notarized sheet from the Treasury site and mailing it and the bonds to DC. Still have a few paper ones, including some I Bonds, so I hope Origin keeps handling them.

My other I Bonds are online only. I usually buy 10k each for me and the spouse each new year, but this year I'm holding out to see what the upcoming fixed rate change looks like.

Just cash them in. What a waste of an investment. I cashed in EE bonds that my mom bought 30+ years later, and it was a disappointment. They obviously stopped accruing interest long before, but just dump money into an index fund. We didn't have things like IRAs and 529s that could be funded the way they are now back in the day, so it might have made sense back then. Makes about as much sense as taking $10k in AMEX travelers checks to Europe for a vacation these days.

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The money I have in I-bonds are part of my emergency fund and would never be used for investing. I can't think of a better place than I-bonds for that as they offer protection against inflation. Which is the biggest risk to holding cash long term.

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My wife and have ~ $150k of I-bonds as part of an emergency fund as well, 2011 was a very good year.

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My wife and have ~ $150k of I-bonds as part of an emergency fund as well, 2011 was a very good year.

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That’s a crazy amount of “emergency funds” under any reasonable definition of emergency funds. Just fyi.

You have to buy on the treasury online version of the DMV

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It's a pin drop compared to the rest of our investments, you have no clue what our annual spending is, and we are many years retired.

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Congrats. And? You said it was a “part” of your emergency fund, implying you have potentially much more in emergency funds than $150k.

What I said isn’t really debatable - it’s a crazy amount of emergency funds. You said you’re retired, so what’s the point of your emergency funds? You’re not going to get fired from retirement. Maybe you misspoke when you called it emergency funds and it’s actually part of your non-equity portfolio or something, but to call hundreds of thousands of dollars an emergency fund for a retiree is objectively crazy.

I guess my point is that if your portfolio is structured well in retirement, you don’t need an emergency fund under any typical definition. Cash flow should be incredibly well defined and predictable. Maybe a self insurance fund or something, but I wouldn’t consider that an emergency fund in a traditional sense.

Lastly, I do know what you spend in retirement - you’ve told us on here. $8.5k to $14k was your spend, according to you, so you’re keeping an emergency fund of at least 10x your max monthly spend and you’ve been retired for 14 years. Like I said, that’s crazy. I look forward to you arguing how/why it’s not.