Premium Bond Winner ?

SnowMan

ljayljay said:

justwantedtosay said:

Kim_13 said:

We don’t know what people’s circumstances are and a £25 win might mean they don’t have to skip meals this week. 

Someone with 500 bonds 'should' currently expect to win £25 once in 42 years so it wouldn't be wise to rely on it to pay for their meal. And if they were unable to feed themselves surely they would have cashed in their premium bonds already.

I don't think that can be correct. Just done a quick check on the MSE probability calculator & it gave me this..
 
With average luck, you would expect to win roughly £75 over 5 years if you have £500 of Premium Bonds. Actually I was surprised it was that high but your calculation is clearly a massive under estimate.

With £500 with current odds you expect to win a prize every 3 years and 8 months. You expect to win specifically £25 roughly every 8 years 7 months. And you expect to win £1,000,000 once every 11 million years. 

eskbanker

justwantedtosay said:
I can't understand why such surveys don't give a box for random suggestions. Someone - probably not me - might come up with a great idea they'd not thought of.

I don't think it's unusual for such surveys to be constructed to determine which of a finite and controlled set of options is preferred by the majority, rather than it being some open fishing exercise to gather ideas that people think are great.

justwantedtosay said:
The current £25 would have been worth £15 in 2009. There's got to be a point when they realise it's not worth having a £25 prize.

If it was a product with a history of alignment with inflation then perhaps, but the prize fund scale and structure have been changed many times for other reasons over the years, so it would be difficult to identify which would be a starting point to try to recreate!

justwantedtosay

eskbanker said:

justwantedtosay said:
I can't understand why such surveys don't give a box for random suggestions. Someone - probably not me - might come up with a great idea they'd not thought of.

I don't think it's unusual for such surveys to be constructed to determine which of a finite and controlled set of options is preferred by the majority, rather than it being some open fishing exercise to gather ideas that people think are great.

justwantedtosay said:
The current £25 would have been worth £15 in 2009. There's got to be a point when they realise it's not worth having a £25 prize.

If it was a product with a history of alignment with inflation then perhaps, but the prize fund scale and structure have been changed many times for other reasons over the years, so it would be difficult to identify which would be a starting point to try to recreate!

I've often completed a survey just to express a view but never get the chance. It's like being asked how you'd prefer to be killed without anywhere to point out that you'd rather they didn't.

Surely you must think it odd that with the lowest ever prize being £25, still having it now - nearly 70 years on - represents a very different attitude to prizes from NS&I. Each month, obviously, it becomes the least valuable prize there's ever been, that can't go on for ever.  

eskbanker

justwantedtosay said:

I've often completed a survey just to express a view but never get the chance. It's like being asked how you'd prefer to be killed without anywhere to point out that you'd rather they didn't.

That analogy is just silly!  They're simply asking which of some defined options do you prefer, rather than opening up the discussion to random suggestions.

justwantedtosay said:

Surely you must think it odd that with the lowest ever prize being £25, still having it now - nearly 70 years on - represents a very different attitude to prizes from NS&I. Each month, obviously, it becomes the least valuable prize there's ever been, that can't go on for ever.  

I evidently don't feel as strongly as you do about this but can see the argument that many will prefer reasonably regular small prizes rather than occasional larger ones.  Ultimately there are no right or wrong answers though, just lots of opinions about how many slices to carve the pie into, hence NS&I's reluctance to solicit 'helpful' ideas....

justwantedtosay

eskbanker said:

justwantedtosay said:

I've often completed a survey just to express a view but never get the chance. It's like being asked how you'd prefer to be killed without anywhere to point out that you'd rather they didn't.

That analogy is just silly!  They're simply asking which of some defined options do you prefer, rather than opening up the discussion to random suggestions.

justwantedtosay said:

Surely you must think it odd that with the lowest ever prize being £25, still having it now - nearly 70 years on - represents a very different attitude to prizes from NS&I. Each month, obviously, it becomes the least valuable prize there's ever been, that can't go on for ever.  

I evidently don't feel as strongly as you do about this but can see the argument that many will prefer reasonably regular small prizes rather than occasional larger ones.  Ultimately there are no right or wrong answers though, just lots of opinions about how many slices to carve the pie into, hence NS&I's reluctance to solicit 'helpful' ideas....

Not at all silly as none of the options was a sensible choice as each was worse than present. Which way you want to be worse off isn't much of a choice.

eskbanker

justwantedtosay said:

eskbanker said:

justwantedtosay said:

I've often completed a survey just to express a view but never get the chance. It's like being asked how you'd prefer to be killed without anywhere to point out that you'd rather they didn't.

That analogy is just silly!  They're simply asking which of some defined options do you prefer, rather than opening up the discussion to random suggestions.

Not at all silly as none of the options was a sensible choice as each was worse than present. Which way you want to be worse off isn't much of a choice.

In the context of your remark that "it was asking which way of lowering the total prize value would you prefer", it's hardly realistic to expect to be given an additional option of how to increase (or even preserve) the prize fund?

Arrietty

Just putting it out there that I am quite happy to accept any £25 wins that people feel are too low 

ljayljay

justwantedtosay said:

ljayljay said:

justwantedtosay said:

Kim_13 said:

We don’t know what people’s circumstances are and a £25 win might mean they don’t have to skip meals this week. 

Someone with 500 bonds 'should' currently expect to win £25 once in 42 years so it wouldn't be wise to rely on it to pay for their meal. And if they were unable to feed themselves surely they would have cashed in their premium bonds already.

I don't think that can be correct. Just done a quick check on the MSE probability calculator & it gave me this..
 
With average luck, you would expect to win roughly £75 over 5 years if you have £500 of Premium Bonds. Actually I was surprised it was that high but your calculation is clearly a massive under estimate.

You're right. I don't know where I got that figure. Working it out for myself I reckon it's one £25 win every 8.5 years. That 42 year figure looks like the chance of winning £25 with 100 bonds, not 500.

Just for clarification what you have quoted is specifically for a £25 win...but if you include other larger wins you can expect a win on average of less than 4 years. That will more than likely to be £25, £50 or £100 presumably producing the £75 average. Of course to get £75 you would need at least 2 wins which is less likely than getting one win of a lower or higher amount up to £100.

grandweb

Lopo said:

Yippppeeeee......!

Feb has been my best month yet!

Have only ever won smaller £50 amounts, with the occasional rare £100.00. The last win was for £50 in November.

So a 2 month wait, This month has won 3 prizes, a new first for me too totalling £600, made up of 1x £500 and 2x £50

so happy!

Dont know my total holding value as I would like to be surprised one day and told that it is maxed out, a sort of mystery savings pot currently which I add to monthly! Winnings are automatically re-invested.

Complete PDF winning list here! LARGE 9MB file >>>

http://www.nsandi.com/products/pdf_lgs/pb_bondlist_02_07.pdf

Best of luck everyone...

Hi all,

Bit of a random question, but I'm hoping someone here might have kept some of the old Premium Bonds full winners lists that NS&I publish on their website, e.g. from this post in 2007! Unfortunately the download link no longer works.

NS&I only publicly share the last 6 months of data, but I'm trying to help archive as much of the historical data as possible. I’m especially interested in filling the missing gaps shown on this coverage page here https://premiumbondsresults.com/coverage

The files were either published as zips, txt files or pdfs for the older ones. If you still happen to have any of these old files, I'd love to know.

Thanks in advance

Alex.T

No win for me in Oct 2025 draw, £10k holding. And withdrawn due to needing money elsewhere. 

£450 over the period of 12months, which is about average I suppose.