Prize Bonds are looking attractive alternatives to deposits

Due to the Red Weather Alert from Thursday afternoon the 1st March to midday Friday the 2nd March the Prize Bond draw which was to have taken place on the morning of Friday 2nd March will now take place on Monday the 5th March.
 
Was the €500 a single won or 10 x €50. Well done - I have twice what you have for the past 5 years and haven't even won €300. Nothing at all this year!
 
Well done to you - haven't heard of anyone winning €500 before. It's usually €50 on here and the odd €100. Maybe I won't give up hope yet enjoy your winnings.
 
Nice one Steiner, I managed to snare one 'win' of €1000 a few months back, it averaged out my 2017 annual returns nicely ahead of the best one year rate and no dirt payable.
 
honeybadger12 said:
€5,000 purchased 4 years ago, have won €10. A nice 0.002% return on my money lol
Click to expand...
???
€10 is 0.2% of €5,000.
But there aren't any €10 prizes. The minimum you can win is €50.
If you won a single €50 prize your return is 1%, which is pretty much exactly what you'd expect to average over four years at current payout rates.
 
Last edited:
Does anyone know how I might make a large one-off purchase? It seems some of the options are restricted to £1k per transactions.

I am looking to purchase c. 25k euros worth.
 
Mortgagey said:
Does anyone know how I might make a large one-off purchase? It seems some of the options are restricted to £1k per transactions.

I am looking to purchase c. 25k euros worth.
Click to expand...

You can buy online, its a poor system as you have to go through it, filling in the blanks as you go and then it limits your purchase to a small sum but if you hit the back button it will give you an option to buy a lump sum on your card.
 
Weekly prizes range from €50 to €50,000, with a €1m prize twice a year. (PB Website)

I've dabbled in Prize Bonds over the years and often checked out AAM & boards.ie for info. I've only ever had a few €50 winners - and have never heard from a big winner except for the recent €500 win by .

Do people actually win €50,000 every week and €1M twice a year?
 
Last edited:
Trying to buy a large sum myself these days but have given up for the time being with the warm weather

I don't have a debit card and my bank UB will not issue a draft to An Post/NTMA and there is no other option it seems, don't have a personal cheque book either and haven't had for maybe 30 yrs. Rang up and their suggestion is that I lodge the money in the credit union as they will give a draft for it. All that puts me off that option is the length of the queues in my local CU, out the door most days!
 
Logo said:
...have never heard from a big winner except for the recent €500 win by . Do people actually win €50,000 every week and €1M twice a year?
Click to expand...

The number of €m winners is smaller than the number of people struck by lightning each year. How many of those do you know?

Monbretia said:
Trying to buy a large sum myself these days but have given up for the time being...
Click to expand...

Yeah, I find it bewildering that I can't just do a bank transfer for all NTMA/State Savings, and get the money back the same way. Although I've done it by cheque, I find it a considerable deterrent.
 
Weekly prizes range from €50 to €50,000, with a €1m prize twice a year. (PB Website)

Logo said:
Do people actually win €50,000 every week and €1M twice a year?
Click to expand...

Surely I would have heard of at least one €50K winner - especially if there is one winner each week and I've lived in a small town for the past 50 years.

dub_nerd said:
The number of €m winners is smaller than the number of people struck by lightning each year. How many of those do you know?
Click to expand...
Yet two people win €1 Million each year and I have yet to meet one. At least I can justify not meeting those struck by lightening because they are no longer around to tell the tale.
 
Last edited:
Logo said:
At least I can justify not meeting those struck by lightening because they are no longer around to tell the tale.
Click to expand...

Not true. Most people struck by lightning survive.


If you're going to gamble you should develop an intuition for odds.
What are the odds that you would have heard of a €50k winner if you were living in a small town for 50 years?

Let's make some simplifying assumptions: 1) everybody in the country is equally likely to buy prize bonds, 2) you've lived in the same small town for 50 years with a fixed population of p people, and the population of the country has been fixed at 4 million, 3) anyone in your town who wins €50k will instantly come blabbing to you, whereas you won't hear of anyone outside the town.

With this sort of problem it's easier to work out the odds of not hearing of a winner, then get the other odds by subtraction. This is because the odds of doing something again and again are multiplicative. So we work out the odds that someone not in your town wins the €50k in one week, and then we raise that to the power of 52 weeks x 50 years = 2600. So the probability of no €50k winner in your town in 50 years is:



In Excel or Google Sheets you could do this with: =POWER((4000000-A1)/4000000,2600), where A1 is the population p of your town. If your town's population is 5,000 there is a 4% chance of no winner, and therefore a 96% chance that you will have heard of a winner. But if you live in a hamlet of 1,000 people there is a better than evens chance you will never have come across a winner.
 
I can only thank you for the stats Dub_Nerd. Population of me to the power of (4000000-A1)/4000000,2600) that I have less of a clue now about statistics than when I was a student of probability. Regardless of the town size, I have yet to read online of a winner besides STEINER of any substantial sum.
You convinced me (or bamboozled me) on the stats front based on a small town but I still can't get away from the great Prize Bonds PR claim that Weekly prizes range from €50 to €50,000, with a €1m prize twice a year.
 
If I got the €50k nobody would know unless I told them, I did get €1000 in one payout last year, this year has been truly shocking but we live in hope in the PB members only club.
 
Logo said:
You convinced me (or bamboozled me) on the stats front based on a small town but I still can't get away from the great Prize Bonds PR claim that Weekly prizes range from €50 to €50,000, with a €1m prize twice a year.
Click to expand...

The €1m doesn't increase your chances of hearing about anything, because it replaces the €50k on the weeks when it occurs. Ok, there are ten times as many €500 and €1,000 prizes but are people really going to be singing from the rooftops about those sorts of amounts, even in a small town? They're probably thinking it'll buy no more than a few rounds for the scroungers down the local, and keeping shtum.

I think the real lesson is that your chances of winning anything significant are really, truly tiny. And that's what I've been saying on these pages right from the beginning. If you are going to invest in Prize Bonds the only sensible approach is to calculate the return in €50 prizes only, and to buy enough of them (i.e. many tens of thousands of euro) to make the average return likely in short order. And since that return is now down to 0.27% tax free, I wouldn't consider them worth while at all. And therein lies their cleverness ... the lure of the (impossible) €1m is obviously still sucking people in.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Menu
Log in
Register