Gyroscopic Investing

Does anyone know of a way to setup a monthly deposit into long term treasuries or TLT without paying paying a huge transaction fee?

I suspect the answer will be no. 

You can program Treasury Direct to automatically purchase any Treasury security on a schedule, or manually, for free.

http://www.mymoneyblog.com/how-to-build ... guide.html

Fidelity also offers free Treasury transactions, but I don't know if you can automate them.

Nothing is perfect, but depending on transaction frequency, amounts and whether you might be doing more than investing solely in TLT, you might look at Foliofn. 

If you can stomach a one-time yearly fee of $290, you can buy/sell any amount (down to .01) free as often as you like in most stocks, and ETFs (including TLT, EDV, GLD, VTI, SHV and SHY) during one of the two daily transactions windows (11:00 or 2:00).   You can also make regular purchases and sales with stop/limit orders outside the daily windows for an additional nominal fee.  They also offer many no load mutual funds without transaction fees.  For an additional $25 custodial fee per year you can add an IRA account in which you make transactions for free to your regular account.  It makes investing or reinvesting small dividend payments or deposits pretty easy and more cost effective than it appears on the surface (if you are doing it frequently, like 6 times or more a month in your combined accounts).  Like most brokerage accounts you can write checks, etc.

They have another payment plan where there is no yearly fee, but you have to make at least 3 commission producing transactions ($4 each) or you are charged a $15 quarterly fee.  ( I've never used this one -- look at their web site.) 

One downside is that they won't purchase or hold actual bonds, most individual foreign stocks (other than big ADRs) or preferreds, or pink sheet (very small cap) stocks.  Also you can't single out an individual security for automatic dividend reinvestment, you have to do it with all the securities in the account -- but you can very easily go in and direct a single reinvestment or cross investment by yourself.  It works a little differently than many brokerage accounts but I've experienced very good service from them for eleven years.  The firm was established by a former SEC commissioner.         

Similar to FolioFn, maybe a tad cheaper: BuyAndHold.com. And ShareBuilder.com.

HB Reader wrote:
If you can stomach a one-time yearly fee of $290, you can buy/sell any amount (down to .01) free as often as you like durinin most stocks, and ETFs (including TLT, EDV, GLD, VTI, SHV and SHY) 

They have another payment plan where there is no yearly fee, but you have to make at least 3 commission producing transactions ($4 each) or you are charged a $15 quarterly fee.  ( I've never used this one -- look at their web site.) 

That's pretty good, especially the 2nd option.  If you made 4 purchases per quarter, the yearly fee would only be $64. 

Still, probably too much of a fee if someone is putting only small amounts of money in every month. 

Adam1226 wrote: Does anyone know of a way to setup a monthly deposit into long term treasuries or TLT without paying paying a huge transaction fee?
I suspect the answer will be no. 

The closest I've come is to have TLT reinvest distributions rather than pay them as cash.

I'm with the others -- free Treasury trades at Fidelity or Schwab seem like your closest approximation.  I don't know of any way to automate that, though, and doubt that there would be.  I like plucking mine "straight from the yield curve" on that little graph they show you.