A bond is a type of loan. Basically, you are asking the citizens to each give you a simolian that you're going to pay back with interest as soon as you can. For every hour that you fail to repay a bond, you MUST pay interest. This is different from other types of loans where the interest can be added to the principal.
As such, the interest you pay out every hour is added to your expenses and is displayed on your balance sheet. If you fail to grow your city or your city is struck by a tragic decline (for instance, your people are carted off by aliens), you may suddenly find yourself drowning in the red. Once you run out of cash, the game will end.
Bond Strategy
Bonds are not to be taken lightly. You should never take out a bond if your revenue is in the negative unless you absolutely have to (your next turn will end your game). The nature of loans is that they cripple the borrower and by their very nature eat up cash.
If you have taken out a bond, never let your bankroll reach less than a thousand simolians. That's dangerous territory because a large fire or other disaster could instantly end your game.
The one and only time I would recommend using a bond is when you have one or more revenue-producing buildings that you would like to plop down. Only then would I consider taking out a bond because I know in advance that the revenue produced by those buildings will cover most if not all of the interest while I'm waiting to generate enough cash to pay back the principal.
But in real life, I don't even do that. I patiently wait to gain the cash I need and then spend it once I have it. Bonds -- like in real life -- are financial quicksand: the less you experiment with them, the safer you are.
Alternatives to Securities
Most times when people take out a bond, it's at the very beginning of the game when they want to accelerate the growth of their city. This is a mistake for two reasons.
Firstly, the interest will undercut any gains you make until you pay off the bond. You're trading off the slow progression of your city at the beginning of the game for a slow-down in the early middle. So you're not actually gaining anything -- unless, of course, you just want to build a city as fast as possible and then quit the game.
More importantly, though, you can only build a city from scratch so quickly. The very act of laying out street grids and planning where you're going to zone and plop is a complicated and slow task -- unless, of course, you build the same identical city each time. Barring that one exception, as you lay out your city, the areas you have already zoned will have a chance to grow and start generating in no time.
Alternatives available to you are to look at your police and fire station distribution to see if you can eliminate one of them. Or even better, keep your roads low density on the edges and drive people toward a few strategically placed medium-density roads in the middle. You can also build revenue generating buildings and modules (like the department of finance at City Hall). Finally, the easiest way is to plop down a park to increase land values in an area -- by proxy generating more cash for you to expand low-income areas.
Patience is the key to financial success. On rare occasions, you might like to dabble with a huge influx of cash, but those times should be rare and experimental rather than operational.
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