Lottery Linked Accounts Could Make You Rich
In a prior posting I reviewed the basics of how Lottery or Prize Linked Savings Accounts work and what the benefits are to you (spoiler: you don’t risk any money and from some vendors you earn regular interest and have a chance to win more in lottery style games with daily, weekly, and monthly drawings). In this one I’ll review my experience with Yotta and how much interest I’ve made with them.
Background
In November 2022 I noticed that in the prior year I earned $0.72 in interest on about $10,000 in a savings account at my usual bank. Unfortunately, my sleazy big bank was not increasing their interest rate payout despite undoubtedly now earning a greater return on what they’re doing with my money. That’s the day that I decided to find a new bank. Once I decided to try a Prize Linked Savings Account (last plug: see prior posting here for description of what that means), I chose Yotta for my first foray because the experience most closely mirrorred the lottery experience. I have since also tried another which I’ll write about another time.
What Was the Experience Like?
For my deposit of $9809 I received 392 weekly tickets at the end of November. Tickets accumulate at the rate of 1 ticket per $25 deposited. There all sorts of things you can do to get extra tickets from using a Yotta debit card to referrals for new accounts (use code BZRILES to get us both some extra tickets if you sign up here!). At the time, the program was set up for a weekly prize drawing with each day revealing one new winning number until all numbers had been revealed. You could go see your matching tickets, look at what future numbers would make you the most money based on your tickets, and track your earnings as they grew throughout the week. This was actually quite fun; I found myself logging in daily to look at what numbers would yield me the most winnings and then checking again when the next winning number was revealed. With just one drawing per week my winnings ranged from $1 to $8 per week. It felt like the lottery and I was really enjoying having my savings there. Then it all changed.
Yotta does a 180
Unfortunately, about 3 weeks into my Yotta experience, Yotta changed the game on me shifting away from weekly drawings to daily drawings. I personally found the experience for weekly drawing more interesting and exciting. With the daily drawing I just have less engagement. It’s over by the time I look so they’ve eliminated any weekly suspense. I do frequently look at what I’ve won after the drawing but it’s just not as exciting. Because the drawings are now daily, the typical winnings for my account are from about $0.15 to $0.80 a day. After a few weeks I contacted Yotta’s customer service group to point out that the prior experience was much more compelling and that I preferred building anticipation through the week as well as winning dollars per week than pennies per day. I received the following response:
In other words, they didn’t really care.
Why did Yotta Change?
Their communication on the change left a lot to be desired and was never adequately explained. The messaging focused on getting a daily chance to win $1 Million instead of telling me why they made the change. I was only with Yotta for a few weeks before the change, but it was so much more interesting and fun with weekly drawings that I just haven’t been as interested since. However, the fundamentals are still there and if you join now, I’m guessing you’ll feel some of the thrill that I had under the old system without the disappointment I now feel. See below for how the prizes changed. You can still win a daily jackpot of $1 Million, so there is still that element of thrill with no risk to your money.
Enough about that, how much have you earned?
Well, when you log on to the app it no longer tells you your rate of return so I’ve calculated it below. The app does tell you how much you’ve earned:
Without working to grow my ticket count I earned a total of $65.48 over 130 days. There is a compounding effect there but the total return from my initial deposit works out to roughly a 1.9% annual return. This works out to a value of $.0012 per ticket over the 130 days. If I were to perform some of the additional activities to get more tickets I could predict what the additional increase, on average, would be. For example, if I used a debit card, credit card, or setup direct deposit with Yotta and earned 500 more tickets per day, I could expect to get much closer to a top of the market savings account at around 4%. Plus, I’d still have the chance for big money prizes without losing any of my deposit!
While I handily beat the .01% return of my old savings account (as well as savings accounts at Chase, Fargo, Citibank, and BOA which are all miniscule), the question for me was — do I leverage additional Yotta services to get more tickets and increase my return? If not, is the upside potentially of winning a $1 Million jackpot worth ~2% less return than the highest yielding savings accounts? Those are questions you’ll need to answer for yourself. If you decide to try Yotta, please enter referral code BZRILES to get us both some extra tickets (one time usage). Who knows, it may be the extra odds you need to win the jackpot!
Closing Thoughts
I wish I hadn’t ever experienced the anticipation and excitement of the Yotta weekly drawing because it made the change to a daily drawing very disappointing. If you’re just joining now I’m sure you’ll still find it enjoyable. What Yotta has done for me is reinforce how infinitesimally small my chances of hitting the lottery are. Considering I’ve “played” nearly 400 tickets a day for 130 days and rarely matched more than a few numbers it’s a perfect illustration of how stacked the odds are against winning. I still have my money in Yotta but decided to open another Prize Linked Account with a different company for comparison. I will share those results in another post.
