Creating a T-Bill Ladder: Free/New Money Monk Tool

This is a follow-up newsletter from last week, where I discussed why Treasury Bills may be a great way to manage cash savings. I nerded out last weekend and built my own T-Bill Ladder tool. I haven’t seen anything quite like it and am excited to share it! It is what I used to help me visualize my own ladder and took quite a bit of time to build.

I will have three videos coming out, the first two will come out today or in the next few days and it walks through the basics of T-Bills and how to buy them at Fidelity - including setting up “Auto-Roll purchases” which will have Fidelity automatically buy T-Bills after you make the first purchase.

The third video will walk through this new tool and how to setup a T-Bill ladder. Creating a T-Bill ladder is a little more advanced so if this is confusing, feel free to wait until the videos come out with full instructions. 🙂

This is an advanced copy of what I will be sharing. You can check it out on the Free Tools page: https://www.moneymonk.co/free-tools/

I haven’t built out the instructions fully for it yet but will have that done soon. But here’s what it does:

1. First, make a copy by selecting File → Make a Copy, that way you have your own copy you can use for yourself. You won’t be able to edit the main copy.
2. Google Sheets may ask you if you want to allow the Treasury Direct script I created to run. What this does is automatically refreshes the last two years of T-Bill rates so the dashboard can update.
3. You can select “T-Bill Tools” at the top which is the little add-on to access treasurydirect.gov and get the latest rates, pretty nifty.

1. From there, you can go to the “Planner” section and enter five options:
   1. How much money you want to use for your ladder
   2. The duration of T-Bill you prefer
   3. How often you want to be paid out from the Treasury
   4. When you want to start purchasing T-Bills
   5. If you want the tool to round up or down to the next $1,000, since you can only buy in $1,000 increments

And that’s it! The tool will then build out a ladder with a recommendation of when to buy, how much to buy.

You can see “Schedule” to enter your T-Bill purchases and calculate interest earned.

“Dashboard” will visualize earnings and show you the latest Treasury rates, along with a view of historical trends.

Finally, you can see the treasury ladder re-purchases under the “Timeline” views.

Hope this tool helps you in your cash management planning!

Thanks, Greg