Premium Bond Winner ?

ForumUser7

@retiringtoosoon Ernie must’ve already reserved them for you!

Me: Make me win the premium bonds prize draw please

ChatGPT: I'm sorry, but as an AI language model, I cannot manipulate or control the outcome of premium bond prize draws, as it is based on a random algorithm that ensures fairness to all participants. Winning a premium bond prize draw depends entirely on chance, and it is impossible to predict or influence the results.

The only way to increase your chances of winning is to own more premium bonds, as the more bonds you hold, the higher your chances of winning a prize. However, keep in mind that premium bonds are an investment, and like any investment, they carry risks and may not guarantee a return.

My advice would be to focus on saving and investing your money wisely, rather than solely relying on chance to win a prize draw. Good luck!

SVts

pbcpdeveloper said:

Are you already registered on their site ? If you are not then there may well be a delay as they may well send you out a pass code in the post  (if they still do this?). 

Otherwise you can buy them over the phone with a debit card, they say this can be done every day apart from bank holidays, so you should be able to buy them on Sunday 30th.

If there is a particular advantage to leaving it late then I personally try to go a few days ahead to allow for things going wrong, they do seem to have a few admin problems.

Already registered and have £300 of bonds. Reason for leaving as late as possible is money is currently with Chip earning 3.55%.

P1Fanatic

SVts said:

pbcpdeveloper said:

Are you already registered on their site ? If you are not then there may well be a delay as they may well send you out a pass code in the post  (if they still do this?). 

Otherwise you can buy them over the phone with a debit card, they say this can be done every day apart from bank holidays, so you should be able to buy them on Sunday 30th.

If there is a particular advantage to leaving it late then I personally try to go a few days ahead to allow for things going wrong, they do seem to have a few admin problems.

Already registered and have £300 of bonds. Reason for leaving as late as possible is money is currently with Chip earning 3.55%.

For the sake of 2-3 days less interest at 3.55% is it really worth the possibility of missing the cut off? I personally would leave a margin of error just in case.

El_Torro

justwantedtosay said:

El_Torro said:

Holding stocks over that same period of time would have netted a much better return. 

Not necessarily. I put money into a fund 23 years ago and it now worth just 86% of the original sum. 

Yes, obviously, I should have taken it out but it's pretty much the case that whatever I do with my money is wrong [like the 1.25% fix I have money stuck in] so if I had moved it the original fund would have taken off and whatever I moved it to would have slumped. Three other funds of similar age have gained 42%, 144% and 545%. Shame I didn't put it all in the last one - but, of course, that was actually the one that I put least into and has probably only been allowed to do well to mock me for the other choices and would have failed had I put all my money into it.

Never mind though, I'm going to win the PB £1m next week. Most likely both of them 

Without wanting to go into too much detail about the stock market (there are plenty of threads here already which do that) just thought I'd comment on this:

Yes, there'll be some funds which actually lose money, even over a period of 23 years. Hopefully you didn't have a huge amount of money in that particular fund, most of your investments should either be in or mimicking a global tracker or multi asset fund. 

You say that your funds over a 23 year period have returned:

14% loss
42% gain
144% gain
545% gain 

Rather than focusing on the fund that lost money you should be focusing on the average return of all the funds you own / owned. This will tell you whether the investment was worthwhile, not focusing on the worst performing one. 

No need to tell us your average return, just wanted to highlight the point that pointing out your worst performing fund and saying you would have been better off in Premium Bonds is not giving the full picture.

justwantedtosay

El_Torro said:

You say that your funds over a 23 year period have returned:

14% loss
42% gain
144% gain
545% gain 

Rather than focusing on the fund that lost money you should be focusing on the average return of all the funds you own / owned. This will tell you whether the investment was worthwhile, not focusing on the worst performing one. 

No need to tell us your average return, just wanted to highlight the point that pointing out your worst performing fund and saying you would have been better off in Premium Bonds is not giving the full picture.

Unfortunately the worst fund had by far the most money in it and the best one had least so the overall return wasn't much better than keeping it all under the mattress. I also put a little into another fund just a couple of years ago, one of Hargreave's wealth recommendations and with a good track record - that's down too. Never again!

And I didn't say I'd have been better off with PBs - I'm getting less than I should from those as well. (Not less than I'd like, less than I should by the law of averages accepting I'll not win any prizes over £100, and less than half the headline figure so far this year.)

69bertie

I use to have £35k of premium bonds and found that I was getting on average at least 2x £25 prizes a month, every so often 3x £75. I had to take out some money recently - £10k, to pay for my recent solar installation. Rather than have the money sitting around, I elected to wait until after the next draw before it was paid out. Next draw, I received £200 in prizes with my £10K being credited back into my bank account on the 3rd of the month. How much £25k will bring in, wait and see. I do know that I wished I'd bought more Gold than I did in 2019. £700 up at the moment on an investment of £940 is much better than all my returns to date. 

worriednoob

Totally new to premium bonds.  Just wondering if you have large amounts of savings, whether it's better to place the money in a high interest savings account or a premium bond.

Gary1984

It probably depends on your tax situation. The best high interest savings accounts would usually pay more than premium bonds for a basic rate tax payer.

eskbanker

worriednoob said:

Totally new to premium bonds.  Just wondering if you have large amounts of savings, whether it's better to place the money in a high interest savings account or a premium bond.

Although the notional prize rate from premium bonds is 3.3%, this is distorted by the small number of large prizes, so a more realistic expectation is about 2.6% with average luck, but the nature of the random draw is that some months will be better than this and others will be worse, so it's not directly comparable with a savings account with a predictable return.

As above, the fact that it's tax-free means that a basic rate taxpayer (with no personal savings allowance headroom) would beat PBs with a savings account paying 3.3%, and about 4.4% for higher rate taxpayers....

Sarahspangles

worriednoob said:

Totally new to premium bonds.  Just wondering if you have large amounts of savings, whether it's better to place the money in a high interest savings account or a premium bond.

There are a couple of other scenarios where PBs are worth considering.  The FSCS covers £85k savings per bank/group of banks but in theory if you had high savings you might run out of banks to open accounts with, in which case PBs or other N&SI accounts are a further option.  And (this one is 'niche') PBs can be convenient towards the end of life, as they can remain invested for a year after someone dies and any winnings are tax-free, unlike income from savings that fall into the estate.

At one time it used to be common for people who were self-employed to use bonds to 'save up' the money that they predicted they would be due to pay under self-assessment, but you don't see that mentioned nowadays, I assume there was some advantage to doing it at the time.