Sunday 21 December 2008

What Timing


The wand of good fortune has waved over us this week, not once but twice. We've both had one of our Premium Bonds picked out for a prize. You can always tell when these arrive in the post, so the envelope gets oohed and ahhed over until the ceremonial slitting open by the winner takes place. It's almost always the minimum prize, but welcome nevertheless as the spoils get shared for us to spend on whatever takes our fancy.

I feel the need for a little light shopping over at Amazon coming on...

5 comments:

petoskystone said...

what is a premium bond?

VP said...

Hi - thanks for asking as I forgot to put a link to the National Savings website. I'll do so shortly.

It's a bit like a lottery ticket, except your uncashed tickets are entered into a monthly prize draw, for prizes up to a million pounds. There are thousands of prizes, most of which are £50.

It's part of the government's way of borrowing money. However, you can have your cash back at any time, but without interest. Instead the interest is used to generate the prize fund for the monthly draws. The prize fund is adjusted from time to time according to interest rates and the amount invested.

Each bond is allocated a number and a random number generator (fondly known as ERNIE as the computer originally used for the monthly prize draw was called the Electronic Random Number Indicator Equipment) is used to select the winning bond numbers each month. The minimum purchase is £100, which gives you 100 entries into the draw amongst millions of others! Any winnings are free of tax.

Can you tell I used to work for them?

petoskystone said...

thanks for the answer. what an interesting idea! the way we americans go nuts over lottery tickets, it's a concept out state & national gov'ts. should consider!

VP said...

Only too glad to help especially as you helped me spot a link I'd left out :)

BTW I haven't come across anyone else with the same problem you highlighted over at Veg Plotting re having to repeatedly set yourself up to comment. I must put something up about it to see if anyone's had the same thing. I don't have that many commenters yet who just have an profile set up so they can comment, so that might be why noone else has mentioned it. Thanks for wanting to comment so much, you've put yourself through some pain in order to do so!

VP said...

And we do have a National Lottery too (in various combos) which raises money for charity! However, unlike Premium Bonds, your ticket only gets entered into the one draw you buy it for, and of course depending on how many tickets get purchased, the prize can be much more than 1 million pounds!