Saving for the future is one of the top goals that many parents have. If you’re not thinking about saving for your child’s future, then it will be difficult to actually help them achieve their goals when the time is right. If you ask most parents, one of the top goals to save for is college. Even though there are a lot of grants and scholarships, there are also quite a few people competing for those same pools of money. Therefore, you can’t just rely on grants and scholarships to save the day — it helps to have some savings in play for your child.

Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, you might wonder what type of savings vehicle you should use. Generally speaking, most people are trying to start as young as possible with their children’s savings accounts. This means that you don’t want to go with something that’s super risky, because you will need the money for an important purpose later on in life. In addition, you will need to also make sure that you keep your child’s investment portfolio balanced. The biggest mistake that a lot of parents make is that they get so busy avoiding risk that their money never really grows. Do you want to look back on 15 years of hardcore saving only to find that you got maybe 1% across the board? Definitely not.

Yet if you need to build something conservative into your child’s portfolio, why not turn to treasury bonds? When it comes to risk, treasury bonds are one of the safest investments around. In fact, this is because they re fully backed by the government. Instead of putting your child’s money into an account that could fail at any time, you can always turn to treasury bonds.

Not sure how to get your hands on treasury bonds for your child’s investment? It’s actually easier than you think.

First and foremost, you will need to open an account with Treasury Direct. This is actually a free service and it’s a zero commission service as well — you won’t pay any commission just to own treasury bonds. The only requirement is that you have a checking account so that you can move money back and forth between the site and your bank. This doesn’t have to be your main bank account, or even a checking account — if you already have a savings account set up for your child, you can use that too. Some people like to set up an automatic reminder to themselves to make a monthly bond purchase, but you can set up any schedule that works for your family’s financial situation.

From there, it’s just a matter of deciding what denomination you want to get. This is in turn determined by the type of bond you have. The best type of bond to get is the Series I bond, which gives you a rate of return over and above inflation. This is also pegged to the Consumer Price Index, giving you peace of mind knowing that your investment will not be eroded over time. If you really want to make sure that your investment in your child will be worth it when the bonds are cashed in, then you might want to go with this bond type. There are also Series EE bonds that have a shifting interest rate.

Overall, it’s up to you to make sure that you not only buy more bonds, but you balance them against the rest of the portfolio. Since the return is steady but not super high, you might want to still go with other forms of investments, like stocks and bonds. If the process of buying treasury bonds sounds straightforward to you, then that’s definitely a good start!