Premium Bond Winner ?

bobby111111111

£175 this month which is the most I've won in a monnth so far, £1200 for the year to date on full houlding, very poor really.

Swipe

Jami74 said:

Nothing again on £125 holding. 

I had £100 for 20 years and didn't win a single prize so I wouldn't hold your breath 

Bantamspaul

Max invested. Won over £400 for the 4th time in 5mths, £25 was the other one.
My mate won £100,000 on £9,000in September 

PixelPound

Swipe said:

Jami74 said:

Nothing again on £125 holding. 

I had £100 for 20 years and didn't win a single prize so I wouldn't hold your breath 

There does seem to be a tipping point somewhere north of £3K whereby you can expect to win something in a year, where as £100-ish then yes highly unlikely to win anything. 

There does seem to be the thought of either it's not worth it at all at that level, to well how much would you get elsewhere and at least you have a very very small in-it-to-win-it factor. You could get around £5 in interest over a year in an easy access savings account. So if you used that to buy a lottery ticket for the wed/sat closest to when you got the interest paid, would you win anything? The odds of winning nothing is 1-(95/96)^2.5 if the odds of winning a £25+ prize is 1in 96 as you could by 2 and a half tickets with £5. This translates to odds of 0.974. The odds of not winning of a year of premium bond draws with £100 is 0.944. So slightly better (National Lottery is better odds per draw and you are comparing 12 PB draws verses buying two and a half lottery tickets a year, even buying 3 tickets brings this to 0.969)

Do people who save regularly play the Lottery, or is it the preserve of those who should save instead of buying tickets on the lottery. If you put £4,000 in a Santander 5.2 easy access and used the interest to buy a lottery ticket every Wed/Sat, how many 3 ball or more prizes would you win. Would this be less/more than the prizes from having £4,000 in premium bonds. At £4k you should be winning a prize once or twice a year. Though if you've limited savings it's putting £4k in the hope you might win a couple of prizes verses £208 guaranteed.

Eirambler

With the current Prize Bond win rates I can't understand why anyone who has more than 5k in savings would play the lottery. If you fancy a flutter on it just put it in Premium Bonds and worst case scenario you'll get your 5k back (granted inflation would hit it a bit), or more likely you'll get 5k plus two or three prize wins a year for as long as you hold them.

With either approach there's an absolutely minute chance of a big win, but with the bonds it's as close to a free play as you're going to get.

Podseas

OTOH you could argue putting that 5k in a regular/easy saver paying over 5% and buying the occassional lottery ticket with the interest would be a better choice.
You'll get over £250 interest in a year and you could spend £50 of that in a year on Euromillions tickets whenever the jackpot goes over say £75M. Guaranteed 4% return and a bit of gambling "fun" every few weeks. Or forego the 4% interest and buy 2 tickets a week for even more "fun". Its not so different from Premium Bonds.

(The math clearly changes for those who are higher rate taxpayers or have over 20k in savings.)

sludgesurfer

Below are my premium bond winds for the last 8 years.  

For all but the first year, I've had the maximum amount invested.  (in the first year I think i only had £30k).  Wins have been pretty er... underwhelming.  From memory, my biggest single monthly win was £175.

For this period, I've been a higher rate or additional rate tax payer so the tax free element was attractive for this portion of cash held outside tax-protected accounts.  However, given my luck, for certain years, I'd have been better with a savings account and paying the tax on the interest.

		2015	2016	2017	2018	2019	2020	2021	2022	2023 (to date)
Premium bond wins		£500	£575	£675	£675	£500	£675	£275	£700	£1075
Interest		1.25%	1.44%	1.63%	1.35%	1.00%	1.35%	0.55%	1.40%	2.15%

pbcpdeveloper

With the exception of the current year you are pretty similar to me, infact if I had won the same amount as you this year we would be within £25 of each other overall.

Kim_13

pbcpdeveloper said:

With the exception of the current year you are pretty similar to me, infact if I had won the same amount as you this year we would be within £25 of each other overall.

Which app is that? 

Sg28

Eirambler said:

With the current Prize Bond win rates I can't understand why anyone who has more than 5k in savings would play the lottery. If you fancy a flutter on it just put it in Premium Bonds and worst case scenario you'll get your 5k back (granted inflation would hit it a bit), or more likely you'll get 5k plus two or three prize wins a year for as long as you hold them.

With either approach there's an absolutely minute chance of a big win, but with the bonds it's as close to a free play as you're going to get.

Playing the lottery at all in any circumstance is mathematically nonsensical. The total percentage of money paid in that is returned to winning players is around 50%. Meaning that for every £2 ticket bought you can expect, over the long run to win back £1. Discount the virtual impossibility of the jackpot and its even lower. 

At least with premium bonds the total paid in (interest) is returned. So the return is 100%.