I had some bonds bought by my parents as a child and I've never sold out. However I have made partial sales over the years, e.g. I used them as a temporary store for a house deposit, and looking at recent records it looks like they must sell the oldest bonds first because the oldest ones I have now are blocks in the thousands. Once upon a time you had physical certificates so you could choose what to sell but they were dematerialised a few decades back - unlike share certificates where we're still waiting! Wearing a programmer's hat it would be a pain to have to deal with a very sparse set of old bonds with numbers in different formats so I can imagine it being a policy to try to reduce them.

I hope they refunded you and didn't just cancel them. That's a somewhat different situation because it was the last purchase that was invalid. Presumably if one of them had won a prize they would have asked for it back! You didn't have any outstanding prizes on the £15? I make that about a prize per 120 years at current odds ...

Yes, the £15 was refunded. I think it must happen a lot, as the letter was not at all accusatory in nature, as might have been the case if they took the view that I was trying to cheat the system! The cancelled bonds hadn't won any prizes, fortunately. I assume that the old ones haven't either, as they reallocated them to my current holder's number, so I would expect the prize checker to have flagged up any prizes for them.

I think that's mainly because the interest rate rose a lot in the last couple of years so everyone has had a lot more prizes. Also as I said earlier the fluctuations month to month are very large so it's easy to feel that things are unusually good or bad when it's just random - something very familiar in the stockmarket of course. In a way premium bonds are a good test of psychology as to how inclined you are to see patterns in random events.

I only have a few hundred in premium bonds currently from when I opened an online NS&I account several years ago prior to covid. I have owned them in the past and received paper certificates back then but cashed those in when I bought my London house back in 2001 as I needed every penny I could lay my hands on.

Talking of that house; it became a rental property in 2012 (when I retired) and will now be put on the market for sale in the first week of 2025. The tenants received early notice just after the Autumn budget and they have since found an alternative and triggered their termination clause at the end of November, which was fine with me.

From the proceeds I will fill my premium bond allocation to the maximum. Part of that decision is to place some money somewhere while I deploy the remainder in a new GIA, for which I will continue reading our low coupon gilt and GIA tax threads and other GIA investment styles with great interest. I have been taking GIA related notes over this past year. Quite the learning curve.

Just to carry on and finish; the house proceeds will effectively form around 55% of total assets. My SIPP and ISAs (45% between them) are fully invested in equities.

I'm rambling on, as usual, but often specific things mean little in isolation and are better with some context.