Yup,
6 separate prizes from ERNIE this month :-) . The most I have ever had is 3 x £25 in one month.All of them £25 each :-(
I used to get lots of £50, the occasional £100 and even a couple of £500 before 2008, now just a stuttering stream of £25.
What has this got to do with DIY.
--
We can discuss the best way to spend it during lockdown.
Owain
Thanks for spamming the group.
Like the Other fake.
Lucky bugger. I had a large amount of money (not far short of the maximum) invested in premium bonds and all I ever got was the occasional £25 - with many months of nothing. Before I met her, my wife had invested much less money, and had often had prizes of £100 or £200 or even £500 once, so she suggested premium bonds. I do wonder whether some of my certificates hadn't been properly registered to my holder number, because it was often the same ones each time that generated prizes, whereas I'd expect a fairly random distribution of prize-generating certificate numbers. I contacted Premium Bonds to check that all was in order and they couldn't find a problem, so ERNIE must just have not liked me ;-)
So for me, return on investment was very poor.
DIY 'investing' (though PBs are not investments).
Shudda bought solar PV panels. In the recent sunny weather, I get £130 week. I shudda bought a lot more of them back then, slipped up :-( Too late now.
I keep a spreadsheet and seemed to do quite well, until 1999 when I got nothing for an entire year. I wonder if this is possible, statistically ?.
The previous year I got 12%. That was year I had a £500 and couple of £100 prizes plus a stream of £50's. Before that I was getting between
5% and 8% a year in smaller prizes, but not much more than the yield on 10 year gilts in the same year.Then they just stopped dead and after a year of nothing all I got was the occasional £50 until 2008 when the occasional £50 became an occasional £25.
I often wonder if they have an alogorithm that looks at how well a bond holder is doing, and if he/she is 'too lucky', intervene.
They always deny it of course, but it begs the question (from a computer point of view), IF Ernie just generates a rendom stream of radioactive emissions, somehow this serial bit stream must be a) converted into an alphanumeric number and then b) compared with the bonds in circulation.
So, depending on the precise point in time, that serial to 'parallel' conversion is critical, as is the matching with actual bond numbers that are still being held. They never seem to re-use cashed-in bond numbers, so the computing required must be awesome. Or it could be a big fiddle, no doubt covered by the official secrets act.
Thank god the government came to its senses then. How much did you get per week after it started raining continuously last Sept 25th, and for another 5 1/2 months ?.
You'd have made far more money by putting that £16,000 into something like Scottish Mortgage Investment trust, which would have turned that sum into about £78,000 today, despite the crash. Instead by the time they are kaput you may have to pay £thousands to a licensed waste contractor to remove them. They contain a lot of nasties like cadmium and you are not going to be able to dump them in the skip of your local amenity tip. That's after you have paid someone to remove them and replace with new ones.
after redundancy, 25 years ago, invested maximum in premium bonds, believe it was £32,000 because I had read that I could expect a prize every month.
Since then successive governments have cut the pot available on bonds.
The sell them and buy some shares moron.
thx for the nice reply, I have now used it all, it's gone, spent, finished. Pray tell as you don't know me, why moron ?
It generally follows the yield on 10 year gilts, which since 2000 has steadily dropped from 6% to 7% to almost nothing now. The yield on premium bonds is currently 1.35% which is better then a
10 year gilt, and way better than German bunds that have a negative yield. That 1.35% determines the total prize fund, but you aren't guaranteed to win anything, even if you hold £50K.They adjust the number and mix of prizes to allow for this, plus making the smallest prize £25 when it used to be £50. There was a weekly £1 million prize once, can't remember when that stopped.
If you had the maximum, then you should have got a steady stream of small prizes in the first 2 years. Did you keep a log of the prizes that you have received ?.
I'm afraid that he's a rather troubled guy, known variously as Andrzej or Andrew Baron. He has an obsession with Usenet, but perversely spends his time trying to destroy the only remaining groups. He craves attention, even the most negative attention, and since most regular users have him kill-filed he forges posts to look like they have come from other users.
He's a bit of a pest, but you have to feel sorry for him.
Do you live in Wales or Ireland or is it some tropical rain forest? And why do you think solar panela are especially hard to dospose of? They are recycled shit-fer-brains.
And that 1.35% is a lot better than you get from a cash savings account.
One of ours just wrote to tell us they've gone to 0.1% :(
Andy
The Halifax wrote to tell us they're going to 0.01% on 2 savings accounts which fortunately we've already emptied. Why do they bother? They might just as well pay zero or worse still charge us for holding our money! :(
It's a pretty simple process really. A true random number generator produces a string of bits. You collect a certain number of bits to make a word, of whatever length you need - 37 bits will give you 134 billion possible numbers which should cover the current 11-digit premium bond numbers. You keep collecting words until you've got a nice long list. Then you check the list against the bonds on the draw - and most won't match as the bond has been cashed or not issued yet. If the first number on the list matches a live bond, they get a million pounds. If the first number doesn't match a live bond, the second number gets a million pounds, and so on until someone's got the top prize. Then you carry on down the list until you've awarded all the prizes. Once you award the last prize, discard the remaining unused numbers, and you're done.
There's a calculator at
Mike
I think the Nat Savings Direct Investor account (internet only) is still paying 1%. It was going to go down to 0.7% but they reversed that decision.
It's probably the safest place to park up to a million pounds right now, since there could yet be some more banking 'failures'.
Opportunities and FACTS are two entirely separate issues, plonker. Even if someone does manage to recycle them, how are YOU going to get them off your roof ?.
Meanwhile the Scottish Morgage IT, Alliance Trust IT and Intercontinental Hotels groups shares that I bought in March are UP by 68%, 55% and 93% already. No need for income. How much has the value of your 2nd hand panels gone up by since you bought them ?.
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