Poor return on Premium Bonds

14bs

I am clearing out my office, and discovered a GBP 1000 premium bond which I bought in - 1993! Whoops....I vaguely remember that I used to get small prizes EVERY year then, so set about letting NS&I know where I now live. Not a good start..their site did not recognise a valid postcode, which appears on the bond, as my old address. Ok, so tried identification with my holder's number. Site is faulty. Try chat link, which works, and am informed that there are no outstanding prizes. Here, all trust in this outfit evaporates. One thousand pounds held for 27 years as an investment, and you say there is NOTHING. I don't believe it. You have "lost" the records. I say this because zero return over that time is not believable, and further you return a letter asking for a witness of my signature as it is "doesn't match that on your records". You are covering yourselves because you don't know who I am.

Thrugelmir

I was given a £2 of premium bonds as a christening gift. Never won a prize in more decades than I care to mention. 

grumiofoundation

Do you understand premium bonds did not in any way guarantee you a payout? 

I am not sure what the probability of not winning on that amount is but it is possible (and hence believes me). 

I would probably just be grateful you are effectively £1000 richer than you were before you found it. 

Archi_Bald

14bs said:

 You have "lost" the records. I say this because zero return over that time is not believable

It is very believable. Your records weren't lost. For as long as you are holding your PBs, you continue to have a chance to win anything in between nothing and £1m. https://www.moneysavingexpert.com/savings/premium-bonds/

dunstonh

Poor return on Premium Bonds

Tell us something new!

bowlhead99

14bs said:

One thousand pounds held for 27 years as an investment, and you say there is NOTHING. I don't believe it. You have "lost" the records. I say this because zero return over that time is not believable

You used to get prizes 'every year', and you have only had the bond for 27 years, so you probably shouldn't imply there is nothing for 27 years. 

With a holding of £1000 and the current (and recent past) monthly odds of winning a prize being over 24000:1, you shouldn't expect a prize every year or even every two years, because you are only entering 1000 draws a month.  With average luck you would expect some prizes in the last few years, but no guarantees. The online prize checker does only cover recent years. Perhaps in earlier years you were getting warrants / cheques sent to your old house and some rascal living there was cashing them in. Or you have really bad luck.

you return a letter asking for a witness of my signature as it is "doesn't match that on your records". You are covering yourselves because you don't know who I am.

If I found out your bond number and wrote to them telling them I wanted the prizes and that I had moved to a new address, and made a guesstimate of what your signature might have looked like thirty years ago, would you want them to just set me up in their system to have the future prizes from that bond sent to my address or bank account based soley on my letter, even though they don't really know who I am, or would you expect them to request further evidence?

They are holding hundreds of billions of pounds of deposits for 25 million customers, and the small size of your investment is enough to be worth a return of £0 in a typical year. In the grand scheme of things, your custom is totally unimportant to them. Plus, their business is disrupted by Covid and large volumes of new customers because some of their products have highly competitive rates compared to banks and building societies. So, providing absolutely top class customer service for old unimportant customers who didn't even bother to check into their account status for a couple of decades, is not going to be high on the list of priorities.

Hopefully once you provide the updated credentials and they know that they are definitely dealing with the bond owner, they will take on board your complaint and perhaps investigate further.

Malthusian

Look on the bright side, the whole point of Premium Bonds is that a tiny number of people win big prizes at the expense of the vast majority who win nothing. So somebody is having a whale of a time spending the interest you would have earned in a conventional deposit (and that of a few thousand other people with equivalent PB holdings).

That is the deal you signed up to in 1993 so that is the bright side.

Gary1984

You say you held them for 27 years and used to win small prizes but also that you'd won nothing for 27 years. Which is correct and how long since your last prize? If it's actually been say 20 years without a prize then for a very back of the envelope calculation we could assume that the odds of winning a prize over those 20 years is about the same as now and also assume that holding £1000 of bonds for 20 years gives about the same chance of winning as holding £20k for 1 year. The calculator on this site suggests the odds of winning nothing with that holding is about 1 in 18000. So you've been very unlucky but it's far from impossible.

And odds are a bit better now than historically so chances of winning nothing probably a bit more likely than 1 in 18,000.

WaywardDriver

Probability of no wins with £1000 over 27 years is about 1 in 700,000. But you say some early wins so not quite as bad as that. With your holding today you'd expect 1 win every 2 years.

wmb194

Over time the odds of winning a prize have changed a lot, too, so I'm not surprised you were/are receiving fewer wins. A quick Google finds that the odds in January 1996 were 15,000 to 1 but today it's 24,500 to 1. There have been periods when it's been 36,000 to 1. Of course, for a long time the minimum prize used to be £50 and not £25, too.
https://www.nsandi.com/historical-interest-rates

Albermarle

As already mentioned a few prizes have obviously gone astray somewhere over the years .