Premium Bond Winner ?

onthebench

Primrose said:

In these difficult Financial Times I would rather they temporarily abolished the million pound prizes and spread the winnings over more people in smaller multiples. Spreading a little more happiness around might reach people who could really do with a small financial boost. 

I don't really see the point in doing that. The two £1m prizes make up less than 2% of the total prize fund, so splitting them up into the low-value prizes wouldn't make much difference at all. (An extra 80,000 £25 prizes in a total of almost 3.8 million!)

This is the breakdown of September's prizes, from Which?
£1,000,000 - 2 (1.81% of total prize fund)
£100,000 - 7 (0.64%)
£50,000 - 14 (0.64%)
£25,000 - 28 (0.64%)
£10,000 - 71 (0.64%)
£5,000 - 140 (0.64%)
£1,000 - 2,204 (2.00%)
£500 - 6,612 (3.00%)
£100 - 30,244 (2.74%)
£50 - 30,244 (1.37%)
£25 - 3,786,474 (85.89%)

https://www.which.co.uk/news/2020/09/premium-bond-winners-september-are-bonds-a-safe-bet-during-a-recession/ 

I suppose you could argue that it would add some excitement to put that money into £100k prizes instead - do that and you could have had 27 £100k winners instead of the 7 there actually were in September. Or maybe just boost the numbers of each of the £5k+ prizes a little - each of those prize tiers currently has 0.64% of the total prize fund, so you could boost each of those by just over half (up to 1% in each tier in fact) if you reallocated the million pound prizes.

As you spread the money down to the smaller prizes, though, it would make less and less difference. And many people, I suspect, are mainly attracted by the possibility, however remote, of scooping a million!

eskbanker

onthebench said:

As you spread the money down to the smaller prizes, though, it would make less and less difference.

Agreed, which is why I made the same point in response to the same poster making the same suggestion after last month's draw!

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/77468043#Comment_77468043

Looking further back up the thread, they made exactly the same suggestion yet again a few months ago and another poster considered it worthy of a complaint to NS&I!

concorde1966

If I have won £425 over 3 years and have £14,000 invested. What does the interest work out per year please?

polymaff

concorde1966 said:

If I have won £425 over 3 years and have £14,000 invested. What does the interest work out per year please?

1%...........

Bravepants

concorde1966 said:

If I have won £425 over 3 years and have £14,000 invested. What does the interest work out per year please?

1.01%

£425/3 = £141.67 (per year)

£141.67/£14,000 * 100 = 1.01% (per year)

/ = divide

* = multiply

eskbanker

concorde1966 said:

If I have won £425 over 3 years and have £14,000 invested. What does the interest work out per year please?

425 / 3 / 14000 = 1.01%

onthebench

eskbanker said:

onthebench said:

As you spread the money down to the smaller prizes, though, it would make less and less difference.

Agreed, which is why I made the same point in response to the same poster making the same suggestion after last month's draw!

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/77468043#Comment_77468043

Looking further back up the thread, they made exactly the same suggestion yet again a few months ago and another poster considered it worthy of a complaint to NS&I!

Having looked at the numbers I can see there could be some argument for boosting the number of upper tier prizes to spread the wealth a little. If you kept one of the £1m prizes, you could, for instance, use half of the other one to increase the number of £100k prizes from 7 to 12 and then use the remaining £500k to boost the number of £50k prizes from 14 to 20 (£300k extra) and the £25k prizes from 28 to 36. That would increase the number of what I would call "very big" wins (£25k+) by more than a third, from 51 to 69.
Alternatively you could leave the rest of the higher amounts unchanged and add, say 70% to each of the £5k and £10k prize pools, but even if you did that the number of people winning a prize greater than £5k would still only be just over 400, compared to 262 now.
I think the negative publicity over scrapping a £1m prize would be fairly great, though.

London7766551

People want to win the million not petty amounts 

MrMorgan

London7766551 said:

People want to win the million not petty amounts 

depends what you define as "petty amounts" - i would be happy with £10K or even £100k and i wouldn't describe them as "petty amounts"

csgohan4

£25 on max, first month though