I'm sure you've probably heard a lot of buzz recently about iBonds, which are all the rage,

but you may not know exactly what they are.

I'm about to explain in full detail in this, the 19th episode of the Retirement Planning Education Podcast.

Welcome to the Retirement Planning Education Podcast, where you can learn all about IRAs and Roth IRAs, employer retirement plans,

taxes, social security, Medicare, portfolio withdrawal strategies, annuities, estate planning,

and much more. And now here's your host, Andy Panko.

Welcome back, everyone. So let's talk about iBonds, where the I stands for inflation. I'm sure you've

probably heard a lot about them, or maybe not a lot, but at least you've heard of them in the last,

I don't know, a handful of months, let's say. I'm about to explain everything. Well, I'd like to think

everything or close to everything that there is to know about them. And as a very helpful reference, everything I'm about to say is all on treasury direct.gov.

So www.tresorydirect.gov, pretty straightforward, but I'll have a link to that in the show notes.

Long story short, iBonds are a form of government savings bonds, so issued by the United

States Treasury, and the interest that you get on them is indexed is based off of actual inflation,

hence the eye and i bonds. So that's a super quick and dirty. Let's get into it. So I got this

broken down by different sections here. I'll start with kind of an executive summary. So as I mentioned, these

iBonds are government savings bonds where the interest is keyed off of inflation. Specifically,

the measure of inflation it uses is what's called the CPI-U or the consumer price index, which is

CPI, and the dash-U denotes for all urban consumers. So the United States Bureau of

Labor Statistics is responsible for tabulating and reporting monthly changes in inflation.

And it does that basically by, there's lots of ways to do it, but the general premise is it comes up with a

hypothetical basket of goods and takes readings of what the price of the goods are within

that basket every month. And each month, based on those readings, there's a value. And the value

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