British savings bonds

Money_Grabber13579

HMRC consider interest to be taxable when it is available to be accessed by the saver. The point here is that since NS&I changed their terms to allow no access to bonds until maturity, the interest cannot be accessed by the saver until maturity, even though it might be notionally credited to the account before then (but you can’t actually go and spend it).

In the last few days, I’ve become less optimistic that these will offer a decent interest rate, given the mention of the green saving bonds. When they were first released, the rate was shocking (when compared to other providers) and presumably the idea was that people might feel they were doing something good and so would be happy with a low rate. Is calling them British saving bonds supposed to invoke some kind of patriotism, such that they’ll also offer a stupidly low rate? I guess we’ll find out in a few weeks.

BooJewels

And yet NS&I do throw out occasional surprises - I had a maturing Guaranteed Income Bond last month - it was paying 3.9% and they offered me 5.27% as an automatic 'do nothing' renewal - same as others reported.  Yet if I'd cashed in some of it and renewed only part of the original balance, their published rate for a new Bond was something like 4.3% - although the product wasn't on open sale at the time.