Halifax prize draw accounts

Ellen07886

Halifax run a monthly prize draw where holders of certain account types (ISAs and savings etc) and have £5000 invested at the end of each month are entered into a monthly prize draw, there are 1603 prizes per month, but obviously interest rates are very low. I'm tempted top open an account  but Halifax refuse to provide the odds of winning,  They say they can't provide them as it's too complicated to work out.  I'm not sure that is the case, I suspect the odds are very low and don't feel they are being transparent. Am I being picky or right to feel that I can't make an informed decision without the full facts?

D3xt3r5L4b

If you’re thinking of taking an account/investing sums of money purely on the basis of a prize draw then I think you know the answer...

PRAISETHESUN

To be fair, it's not much different from "investing" in premium bonds - if you know the odds and have enough saved then you can work out an approximate rate of return.

IMO however the fact they don't want to publish the rates means that they are probably bad and want to discourage this type of attitude. I'd probably just walk away at this point as I suspect a more traditional savings product will offer a better return.

eskbanker

Ellen07886 said:

Halifax run a monthly prize draw where holders of certain account types (ISAs and savings etc) and have £5000 invested at the end of each month are entered into a monthly prize draw, there are 1603 prizes per month, but obviously interest rates are very low. I'm tempted top open an account  but Halifax refuse to provide the odds of winning,  They say they can't provide them as it's too complicated to work out.  I'm not sure that is the case, I suspect the odds are very low and don't feel they are being transparent. Am I being picky or right to feel that I can't make an informed decision without the full facts?

In one of the previous threads about this, someone had calculated the average payout to be 0.03% about five years ago (presumably with some inside information), but obviously with a fixed number of prizes and a variable number of qualifying accounts, the odds of winning are inherently variable (whereas with premium bonds the prize pot is a fixed percentage of total bonds in circulation) so Halifax can't commit to a figure in the way you want them to.