Premium Bond Winner ?

Stonk

pennies2pounds wrote:

Because I am paying my card debt off slowly @ 0 % - or I could of course pay off the card and only have 22K in bonds with 3000 less chances of winning !!!!

Alright then - what the hell are you doing paying off a debt that attracts 0% interest?

pennies2pounds_3

Ok mate I will tell you a little story . Back in 2004 I sold some shares which I was going to use to pay for a wedding. I decided to put the wedding onto a credit card and get the cashback and buy premium bonds with the money from my shares which at the time was 6k . Ok so 6k on a card got me about £30 but what I am doing is paying the wedding off like a %0 loan I suppose . I have always moved the balance to another card before I pay interest ie before the 9 months intro period ended . I pay £100 a month off my card or if my bonds come up I use that to pay a bit off . I have moved to 0% BT 3 times now and havent paid a penny in interest. The bonds have won me so far this year £1500 which I have paid off my credit card. Am I doing something wrong here ?? maybe you think I should pay off the card and have the £100 a month now to buy bonds with - Please let me know if you think im in the wrong as im usually quite good with money .

ManAtHome

Classic way is to re-invest the winnings, then cash in as many as you need to repay if you can't switch to another 0%. Keeping your winnings in bonds gives you even more chances of winning (congrats on the £1k btw, biggest I've had is £100... so far.. hope Ernie's listening).

webwiz

What interests me is NSI's frequent mention of "unclaimed prizes" ("one reason why old bonds win less than newer ones is that older ones are more likely to go unclaimed").

BUT prizes are not "claimed" - they are simply dished out. So what do NSI mean by "unclaimed"? Is it

1) prizes which are returned to them as undeliverable, or
2) prizes which although not returned are never paid into a bank account.

Now NSI will know about (1) but not about (2) until such time as the cheque is so old that no bank will accept it (anyone know when that is?) and even then only if they bother to check. This is not hypothetical. A few years ago I lived in a block of flats where the mail for all the flats came into the lobby and there was a big bin for junk mail. One day I was sorting through the junk mail looking for a letter which I knew should have arrived and found two PB prizes!. I tried to get NSI to check if there had been any other prizes which had not been banked (I had the maximum holding) but it seemed beyond them, and I was never convinced.

Anyway to answer the question, in my case I have over 20000 in blocks of various sizes. I record every win in Quicken against the winning block. Every block is producing a return within the range I would expect except for the oldest block of 400 which has had only one win of 50 in 20 years.

I would not be so quick to dismiss the theory. Nearly all the auditing and validation of Ernie's numbers goes into checking the randomness of the numbers generated, and there is little doubt that they are truly random. However the majority of numbers generated will not be valid bond numbers and the next step is to compare Ernie's numbers with the current register to select the prizes. This process is exactly the sort of data processing which every other government department makes a mess of, so it would be no surprise to me if they were a systematic fault in this computer program which discriminates against older bonds for some weird reason. By the way I started working full time in IT in 1960 (although then we called it EDP) so I am not a beginner.

Stonk

pennies2pounds wrote:

Please let me know if you think im in the wrong as im usually quite good with money .

If you are borrowing money at 0%, you are best off repaying only the bare minimum that you have to (i.e., the minimum monthly payment), and putting your money into a high interest account instead.

pennies2pounds_3

Correct me if I am wrong but I would have to put my money in a 6% gross interest account to have recieved £1541.95 in a year on 25K of which I have already won £1500 this year . I am actually making the minimum paymet on the card plus any winnings too.

Stonk

You misunderstand me. I'm not suggesting anything about where your existing savings should be - PBs, savings accounts, whatever.

I'm just saying pay the bare minimum repayments on your 0% debt. It sounds like you are paying off more than you need to. The extra money you are repaying would work better for you if you put it somewhere else - anywhere else. I suggested a savings account, but equally well you could buy more PBs with it, or even leave it in a current account at 0.1%.

vonney_2

Held a few bonds since the early sixties?!...and never won a thing!!

Pooky

I was told by someone who knows someone who knows someone.....if you get the drift...that the random number generator is programmed to count on at least 5000 bond numbers before stopping at the next number...this means that if you buy in block of £5k you should stand a better chance....I'm sure you'll all have your own theroy on that.

I invested £10k in 2001 and won £50 a month every month for 5 months, then nothing..... cashed them all in in 2003. Bought another £3k's worth last year with my savings to see what happened and didn't win a thing - gave it 6 months and moved it to a decent high interest account..was worth the try.

merseyscouse

I have £600 worth which i have held for about 18 years and never won a sausage....and yes my addie is correct on the registration!!

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