Two lucky winners have each received the £1m premium bonds jackpot prizes in NS&I’s November draw.
The millionaire savers are from Devon and West Sussex, while seven other winners bagged the next-best prize of £100,000.
Here, Which? reveals the winning bond numbers, and explains how to withdraw money from NS&I if you no longer want to invest in premium bonds once the prize fund is cut next month.
November 2020 premium bond winners
The first winner is a woman from Devon, whose winning bond number (207RY321077) was purchased in June 2013, and is part of a total holding worth £39,375.
The second person to win the jackpot is a woman from West Sussex. Her winning bond number (286JH211408) is part of a £50,000 premium bonds holding from November 2016.
- Find out more: premium bonds – are they worth it?
How many winners were drawn in November?
There were 3,978,286 prizes given out in the November draw, worth a total of £113,712,650. Of these, 3,968,914 were worth £100 or less.
The table below shows the full breakdown of prizes:
| Value of prize | Number of prizes |
| £1,000,000 | 2 |
| £100,000 | 7 |
| £50,000 | 15 |
| £25,000 | 30 |
| £10,000 | 75 |
| £5,000 | 147 |
| £1,000 | 2,274 |
| £500 | 6,822 |
| £100 | 31,198 |
| £50 | 31,198 |
| £25 | 3,906,518 |
How do you withdraw your money from premium bonds?
The NS&I recently announced that it will be making nearly £30m of premium bonds prize cuts from the December prize draw onwards, meaning that your chance of winning a prize will fall from 24,500 to 1, to 34,500 to 1.
Premium bonds offer instant-access; you can add to your investment whenever you like (up to a maximum of £50,000), and it’s possible to withdraw all or part of your money whenever you like, either online, by phone or by post.
For the online and phone option, you must have already registered for NS&I’s online and phone service, and you’ll need to know your NS&I number, surname and password to access your account. If you’re online, there’s an option to ‘cash out’, where your funds will be sent to your nominated bank account.
If you haven’t registered for the online and phone service – or you have, but have forgotten your details – there’s the option to cash out by post. This involves downloading, printing and filling in a ‘Premium bonds cash-in form’, and then post it to NS&I.
If you don’t have a printer, you can call NS&I and ask them to send you the forms.
There’s a note on the NS&I website that says it may take around two weeks to process postal withdrawals as it’s working with smaller teams at the moment – due to coronavirus.
However, we’ve heard reports of customers who have been finding it difficult to get their money out.
Customers encounter problems
According to its most recent 2019-20 annual report, NS&I has 25m customers – a number that has likely ballooned this year as the provider has been consistently offering some of the highest interest rates around.
With the widespread rate and prize cuts due to come in soon, it’s likely that hundreds of thousands of these savers will choose to put their money elsewhere – putting tremendous pressure on NS&I’s workforce, which is already stretched due to the impacts of the coronavirus crisis.
One NS&I customer told us that after forgetting their password for their online account they’d been trying to make a postal withdrawal, but NS&I sent the wrong forms. He’d had to call up and wait in a lengthy queue, only to be repeatedly asked for his password – despite explaining that he’d forgotten it, which is why he needs the postal forms.
NS&I acknowledges that customers are often having to wait for a long time on its phone lines. A spokesperson told Which?: ‘We are sorry some customers are experiencing delays when trying to contact us. We encourage customers to use the NS&I website to manage their savings wherever possible.
‘If a customer withdraws premium bonds online or by phone before 8pm Monday to Friday, the money should be in the account in two working days; after 8pm Monday to Friday or on a weekend, the money should be in the account in three working days.’
- Find out more: what is National Savings & Investments?
The Which? Money podcast: are premium bonds worth it?
Last July, our experts on the Which? Money podcast debated whether premium bonds were really worth investing in.
You can listen to the episode below, or check it out on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
source https://www.which.co.uk/news/2020/11/premium-bond-winners-in-november-how-do-you-withdraw-your-money-from-nsi/