Although it’s also tax free which is a main motivation! And when you have £50k the interest is more steady, albeit still lower than market rate.
I actually moved 50k to premium bonds this week after realising I was over the interest cap for tax. Will see what the returns are I guess 
. At least it’s in a safe place.
Nothing for me this month, but I missed out on a chunk of bonds as I’d taken out a house deposit only to have the sale pulled the day after getting the money out 
so January here I come!
My annual rate of return on premium bonds for 2024 was 8.48% so I must be luckier than average. Max monthly prize was £1325, minimum was zero…
That was a fun way earning a grand total of £0
Well lads who’s keeping it for another month?
Are you maxed out? That’s a good hit rate!
Christ, I remember why I didn’t bother going through with purchasing them when I last looked in 2018, the website is absolutely terrible. A right pain in the backside setting up login info with a password manager.
I am at the max now, but started the year at around the 39k mark. I realise I’ve done okay this year… but boy does it hurt when you get £0 
£300 this month! Makes up for £0 last month
You need to have a word with Ernie, the random guy that may help you win 
There is a great video on YouTube in black and white about Ernie and how they used to do the draw before computers. Everything was on paper, the machine spits out a list of bonds and then they have to check manually whether the bond still exists.
The original Ernie spit out 2,000 number an hour and was based on work done by Tommy Flowers.
Nowadays it’s a bit more computerised.
I met the original ERNIE quite recently actually, at the National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park. The size of a room, but still impressive for 1957.
Well worth a visit, by the way.
Agreed, the entire Bletchley Park site is worth a day of anyone’s time.
No luck on premium bonds this month, but I am expecting a call any moment to inform me I won the Omaze house in the Lake District…
Nothing for the past two months on a reasonably large holding. I seem to remember that they were reducing the prize fund though.
£100 for me after a couple of zero months, and my son won £25 on his account which was a nice surprise.
£100 for me. I’m in a premium bond syndicate that we’ve been running 33 years now (people have been dropping out of it due to retirement!) but I consistently win more on my own bonds than on the syndicate ones.
How does the syndicate work?
Nothing here. I should take that money out and buy scratch cards. More exciting
There’s two approaches that you can take, in both cases with everyone signing a contract to keep things on the level.
First, which we do, is basically everyone pays a monthly subscription and the syndicate manager buys bonds in the name of one of the members each month. Thirty years down the line there’s quite a lot in the kitty.
Second, which gets complicated after a while is to do much the same as the above, but with a new syndicate of people every year.
To be honest, we were never expecting to have it running so long!
Problem with the first approach is that after a while it’s a bit off putting to get new people into the syndicate. I think we’re each sitting with about £5000 now so someone entering with £50 would get a tiny fraction of each win.