whats a savings bond savings bond?

http://www.treasurydirect.gov/indiv/products/produ...

Scroll down to I Savings Bonds and EE/E Savings Bonds.

http://www.treasurydirect.gov/indiv/products/prod_...

http://www.treasurydirect.gov/indiv/products/prod_...

You can open an account and purchase Savings Bonds (electronic form) through Treasury Direct.

http://www.treasurydirect.gov/indiv/myaccount/myac...

You can also purchase paper Savings Bonds at most banks.

Savings bonds are bought at banks. You pay half of the face value of the bond ($25 for a $50). It takes about 7 years for the bond to mature to face value. After that, you an continue to collect interst on the bond for 30 years. They are a nice investment if you don't need money right away. You can cash them in before they mature, but you pay a small penalty.

It's a Treasury security.

Treasury bonds (T-Bonds, or the long bond) have the longest maturity, from twenty years to thirty years. They have a coupon payment every six months like T-Notes, and are commonly issued with maturity of thirty years. The secondary market is highly liquid, so the yield on the most recent T-Bond offering was commonly used as a proxy for long-term interest rates in general.[citation needed] This role has largely been taken over by the 10-year note, as the size and frequency of long-term bond issues declined significantly in the 1990s and early 2000s.

The U.S. Federal government stopped issuing the well-known 30-year Treasury bonds (often called long-bonds) for a four and a half year period starting October 31, 2001 and concluding February 2006. As the U.S. government used its budget surpluses to pay down the Federal debt in the late 1990s, the 10-year Treasury note began to replace the 30-year Treasury bond as the general, most-followed metric of the U.S. bond market. However, due to demand from pension funds and large, long-term institutional investors, along with a need to diversify the Treasury's liabilities - and also because the flatter yield curve meant that the opportunity cost of selling long-dated debt had dropped - the 30-year Treasury bond was re-introduced in February 2006 and is now issued quarterly. This brought the U.S. in line with Japan and European governments issuing longer-dated maturities amid growing global demand from pension funds.

You don't want one the interest rate right now is about zero. So basically when you are old and gray you might have earned something on it.