How Much Does It Cost to Invest in Municipal Bonds?
Most tax-exempt municipal bonds are issued in denominations of $5,000 or multiples of $5,000, meaning that you will probably need a minimum of $5,000 to buy a municipal bond from an issuer. You can find the current list prices of widely traded municipal bonds in financial newspapers such as The Wall Street Journal, Investor’s Business Daily or Barron’s, and in the business pages of some major daily newspapers. You can also find this information on the Internet, either via the industry’s trade group, the Bond Market Association, at http://www.investinginbonds.com, or at other websites (though many of the latter will charge a subscription fee). In addition, note that the list prices are generally based on $1 million lots that would be sold at a volume discount, so an individual investor’s purchase of a smaller amount may cost more. Eventually, real-time price information will be made available by the Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board (MSRB), an organization that regulates the brokers
