My wife and I both bought I Bonds directly. It was not exactly a painful or confusing process at all. Granted, the UI/UX of the US government bonds website was not fantastic, but it was certainly usable.
Other than their goofy login page (which you can fix with a 1-liner in greasemonkey), I actually love the TreasuryDirect website. This is maybe a controversial opinion but it's one of my favorite US government websites.
The UX is awesome and the layout is simple: no popups, interstitials or other BS. Even better, the page load times and responsiveness are significantly better than any other financial website a visit. I can check log in AND check my TreasuryDirect balance in about the same time it takes me to log into my Schwab brokerage account or load a thread on Reddit.
Their FAQs are also written in an easily understandable way, which is good because I Bonds and the other bonds they sell have some complicated nuances. They even update the FAQs regularly so that all their I Bond example calculations use the current semiannual interest rate.
One thing that would be cool about this Yotta offering is if they automate some of the I Bond annoyances (I needed a medallion stamp to open my account although not everyone is that unlucky), give a consolidated view of purchases and holdings across across multiple SSNs and EINs, and centralize that management.
I 100% agree; the login is goofy, but overall I prefer the site because it uses a relatively simple UI (and isn't concerned with the latest design fad) to show me relatively simple data. I use Ally for retail banking and now the page loads but it takes several (very noticeable) seconds to load my account balances and while it's doing that, I have to wonder how computers which can do literally billions of operations per second with multi-gigabyte network links can take so long to load a single number. I'll take the 1998 look over that any day.
Just curious, how do you handle accounts that require medallion verification to open. Do you stamp it yourself? That could be a nice benefit for people that don't have a brick and mortar bank nearby
That's like, the primary thing that aggravates people about TD! You speak elsewhere about people having to wait in a line for phone support for hours and the reason people need to do this is because their accounts fail to verify automatically.
Do you support cleanly setting up POD beneficiaries? Do I need to give you my spouses' SSN for that too? Or do they also need a Yotta account?
Glad you didn't have to deal with any of Treasury Direct's nonsense. If you make a mistake logging in, you have to wait on hold with customer support for around 2 hours.
maybe a better app would be a chrome extension that fixed all the bugs on Treasury Direct. You could do all the hairy things in the extension without data leaving the users browser.
The UX is awesome and the layout is simple: no popups, interstitials or other BS. Even better, the page load times and responsiveness are significantly better than any other financial website a visit. I can check log in AND check my TreasuryDirect balance in about the same time it takes me to log into my Schwab brokerage account or load a thread on Reddit.
Their FAQs are also written in an easily understandable way, which is good because I Bonds and the other bonds they sell have some complicated nuances. They even update the FAQs regularly so that all their I Bond example calculations use the current semiannual interest rate.
One thing that would be cool about this Yotta offering is if they automate some of the I Bond annoyances (I needed a medallion stamp to open my account although not everyone is that unlucky), give a consolidated view of purchases and holdings across across multiple SSNs and EINs, and centralize that management.