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IF YOU HAVE some old Prize Bonds sitting in a drawer or filed away in a cupboard, it might be worth digging them out.
Finance minister Michael Noonan has revealed that over €2 million in prizes from Prize Bond draws from over the last decade – and in some cases, even longer – remain unclaimed.
While the holders of winning Prize Bonds are usually notified directly whenever one of their entries has won a prize, few people remember to inform An Post about any change of address – meaning notifications are often sent to addresses where the holder will never get them.
As a result, millions of euro worth of prizes have gone unclaimed over the years.
Despite the existence of the Prize Bonds scheme as an unusual way for the State to borrow money – taking a loan from the public, on the basis that the lender could win a nice prize for doing so – Noonan says there are no plans to assume ownership of any unclaimed prizes.
In response to a written Dáil question from Róisín Shortall, Noonan said unclaimed prizes were still considered to be a liability on the part of the National Treasury Management Agency, the body responsible for managing the government’s public debt.
This means the NTMA always sets aside cash to deal with any claims for unpaid prizes – with the money saved in a Post Office Savings Bank account, instead of being stashed in a dormant accounts fund that might make it more difficult to find.
Around €300,000 in prizes from draws held in 2012 remain unclaimed, out of a total prize fund of €46 million, with a slowly decreasing amount of unpaid prizes from previous years.
For 2003, the last full calendar year for which figures are available, prizes of €70,000 are still unpaid – but there are around €730,000 in prizes from before 2003 which have still not been claimed.
Noonan said unclaimed prizes were still considered to be the property of the Prize Bond holder – and if the holder was deceased, the money would be paid to their estate if claimed.
The ‘unclaimed’ prizes do not include prizes which have been awarded in the last six months, so the true figure for prizes unknown to their winner could be even higher.
Holders of Prize Bonds can visit the appropriate section of StateSavings.ie to enter the numbers of their bonds and see if any of their bonds have accrued prizes they don’t know about.
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Accord marriage counselling. dont make me laugh. they charged us 150 euros three years ago for a mandatory pre marriage course that lasted a day. I needed counselling after paying out that kind of cash.
Stephen, how was it mandatory?
In order to get married in the catholic church, you must do this course
That Bertie bloke’s got a lot to answer for.
You shouldn’t have married him.
Marriage is something that you have to work at. Once both of you talk openly with each other a lot of silly issues can be resolved before they get out of control. Try your best to keep mother in laws away from negotiations as that can spell serious trouble.
It would really help also if the gluttens in the Government stopped savaging peoples finances because the cost of living ain’t coming down e.g mortgages,shopping,electricity/gas…
A good half of marriages I know are financially agreeable. If they weren’t, they wouldn’t last long. People call that love here! Ha ha ha!
Never do it, locked to 1 person for the rest of UR life, no thank u
Totally agree Louise, can’t understand why anyone would get married in this day and age.
Tax
I wonder if Accord will offer their services to the gays when equality in marriage happens.
No, and if it’s marital stress caused by something like having had a pregnancy terminated, they’d probably just hang up the phone on you!
Will they have people qualified enough to deal with gays? Would the counsellors not need to be gay themselves so as to offer the best service.
‘The gays’, its like being back in the 90′s. Sean, how very logical of you.
‘The gays’, its like being back in the 90′s.
Money. The root of all evil ,
Perhaps we need that asteroid to veer off course and smash into earth,
The world really does need to hit there reset button , before the greed ends up forcing us to self destruct
Im afraid to tell you the reset button is made up. We’ll just have to make do . . . Awkward!!
Read “the midnight companion ” http://www.dealing-with-separation.com it’s brilliant .
I think that people want to save their relationships way above the need for financial problems. If it was that simple we would see sites like http://markkordubapsychologist.com/couples-counselling-brisbane/ becoming null and void. Relationship and marriage counselling has become such a useful tool for people because we don’t ever really get a set of instructions when we start a relationship :) Interesting article!
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