Are you a Premium Bond winner or loser?

This is Money Podcast

This is Money

Business News, Business, Investing, News

4.1 • 650 Ratings

🗓️ 28 May 2021

⏱️ 44 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Have Premium Bonds turned you into a savings winner, or are you one of the losers who have been missing out on prizes for years?

On this week’s podcast we dive into Britain’s beloved savings lottery, looking at who holds the most Premium Bonds, who wins and who doesn’t.

NS&I revealed exclusively to This is Money this week that an astonishing 43 per cent of bonds are held by just 4.3 per cent of savers – that’s £56billion out of the £107billion total.

Or to put it another way every £2 out of £5 saved belongs to less than 1million savers out of a total 21.4million.

That may go some way to explaining why close to three-quarters of Premium Bonds savers haven’t won a prize in 14 years.

Georgie Frost, Lee Boyce and Simon Lambert dig into the statistics, deliver a theory on how much you might need to hold to bag at least one prize a year, and look at whether Premium Bonds are worth having.

They are certainly popular and that’s why Nationwide has launched a savings lottery – is that worth signing up to as well?

In crypto corner this week, we discuss the crash, the rebound and the slump again, along with banned adverts and Chinese crackdowns: is this the end of the recent hot phase or just another average week for bitcoin to take in its stride?

Also, on the show, paying bills with commemorative coins – and what legal tender really means, why self-storage is the latest thing in short supply and who is investing’s Czech Sphinx?

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to This Is Money Podcast. I'm Georgie Frost and alongside me and editor Simon Lambert. Today is assistant editor Lee Boyce.
0:06.8	And coming up, premium bond plutocrats, how nearly half of money held in popular NS&I products is from under 5% of savers.
0:15.3	Meanwhile, are you feeling shortchanged? Almost 16 million premium bond holders have one zip, nothing, nutter in 14 years.
0:25.4	Plus, crypto corner update, prices crash, prices bounce back, adverts banned, business as usual,
0:30.8	or is the heat coming out of the market? Also today, can you pay the taxman in commemorative
0:35.6	coins, the self-storage squeeze, and the check
0:38.8	sphinx? Who he? Don't be getting yourself today with all the latest breaking money news, just go to
0:43.7	this ismoney.com.uk, or download the app. But first, let's talk, shall we, about our most loved
0:49.8	savings products. Now, at the start of this month, a huge 21.4 million savers collectively held
0:56.5	£107.4 billion in premium bonds. Yet this is money you've discovered that nearly half of
1:03.8	that money is held by just 4.3% of customers or 920,000 people, which may go away to explaining why we also discovered
1:12.1	this week that 15.9 million holders have won nothing, nothing in 14 years despite holding
1:20.0	as much as 80 billion pounds in the accounts. Premium bonds, Lee, why do we love them so?
1:28.3	Hi, Georgie, yeah.
1:29.3	Well, I think this taps into two things that Britain's love saving, for one.
1:35.3	And the other one is that kind of lottery gambling style element, but without you losing your steak.
1:42.3	And that's what makes premium bonds such an attractive proposition for people.
1:45.9	You can win one of two million pounds prizes every month and people love to be in it to win it.
1:50.7	And the underlying rate at the moment as well of 1% is far better than you're going to get on an easy access account.
1:56.9	People like to gift them to children, to grandchildren, to relatives, their family friends.
2:01.7	They can be those kind of products that easy to gift to people if you're a bit stuck on ideas.
2:09.8	Although I must say if you are gifted them, if you are the parent of a child that's gifted them,
	...

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