Forgotten NS&I Premium Bonds, savings accounts and pensions can be found fairly easily
Ruth Jackson-Kirby Money columnist
It has been nearly 70 years since National Savings & Investments (NS&I) launched Premium Bonds. Bonds cost £1 each and you can buy from 25 to 50,000 of them. Your bonds are then placed in a monthly draw where you could win prizes ranging from to £25 to £1m. You don’t earn any interest but the chance of becoming a millionaire has prompted almost a third of us to hold Premium Bonds. Many of us hold on to our bonds for decades. But many have been forgotten and that means there are millions of pounds of prizes going unclaimed. At present there are 2.3 million unclaimed prizes, with the oldest dating back to June 1957.
If you hold Premium Bonds, you can easily check if you are a winner. You either set up an NS&I account online and then look up your bonds (you can use the app too). Alternatively, you can use NS&I’s tracing service at nsandi.com. Print off the forms and it will track down your bonds and tell you if you are owed an unclaimed prize. Make sure when you move or change your contact details that you let NS&I know, then you will always receive a notification if your bonds win a prize.
However, you may also want to consider cashing in your Premium Bonds. The prize rate was cut to 4.4% in March. That means if you are averagely lucky you should make a 4.4% return on your investment with prizes. But you could win absolutely nothing, which means your money held in Premium Bonds isn’t keeping pace with inflation. With instant-access savings accounts paying up to 5.2%, a guaranteed inflation-beating return could be more attractive than the remote possibility of winning £1m.
Shelter from the taxman
One attraction of Premium Bonds, however, is that the prizes are paid tax-free. So, if you have used up your £20,000 annual individual savings account (Isa) allowance and are likely to exceed your personal savings allowance (£1,000 for basic-rate taxpayers, £500 for higher-rate ones) then Premium Bonds can be a great place to shelter more money from the taxman.
While you are checking to see if you are owed a Premium Bonds prize, look for other forgotten bank accounts and cash windfalls. There is believed to be around £50bn sitting in lost bank accounts, investments, pensions and insurance policies too. It’s all too easy to lose track of accounts if you’ve moved home or job. The good news is,
