I recently wrote about how people are making thousands of dollar with Yotta debit card and some of you inquired why that post was so short while others asked what was the missing piece as odds of winning in Yotta was trash. Some others inquired if the post that was sitting in draft mode was related to Yotta. Well, this is the post that was sitting in draft mode for a while and the missing piece was to use PrizePool debit card as they were running an insane 5% chance of reimbursement promo (and I had mentioned this promotion in the PrizePool review page).
The 5% chance of reimbursement promotion is over so let’s talk about let’s talk about just how good it was. Then we will talk about the current promotion of 1/60 (1.66%) chance of reimbursement and compare it all with the PrizePool debit card’s baseline 0.5% chance of reimbursement. It is important to note that 5% chance of reimbursement isn’t the same as 5% cashback. Some will get far more than 5% while others will get less than 5%. You can read about it in my separate article here where I look at 2% chance of reimbursement of Yotta Credit Card.
Join Yotta using my referral code LUCKISYOURS and we’ll both get 100 tickets. Yotta is an FDIC insured savings account where you can win prizes up to $10M every week.
https://join.withyotta.com/LUCKISYOURS
Also, get 1,000 bonus ticket after spending $2,000 within 4 months of getting your Yotta debit card.
Anyway, prior to debit card launch, the primary way of accumulating tickets was by holding balance in PrizePool. Each dollar earns you a ticket a day. For example, if your balance is $1000 then you would earn 1000 tickets a day.
The more tickets you hold, the higher your chance of winning the prize (more on this later because it is not what you think it is). Their highest monthly prize is $10,000, one of which was won by a reader of this blog and because they had joined through my referral, they got an extra $1000 kickback and so did I.
1. How Much Tickets Do You Earn with A Debit Card?
With the PrizePool debit card, you earn 30 tickets per dollar spend. What does that mean in terms of cashback? That’s a very trickily question because how much a ticket is worth is all based on your probability of winning. For example, there is a probability (although small) of someone with $1 balance winning $10,000 prize. This is why putting a dollar value on each ticket is a hard thing to do.
2. How do I Get the Maximum Tickets Through Spend?
The maximum ticket accrual per period is 3,000,000 tickets. Ticket balance is reset each Series. If you spend $2,500 each day you will net 2,250,000 tickets in 30 days. You will still be short by 750,000 tickets which means you need to, on average, acquire 25,000 tickets per day. Obviously this doesn’t account for your desire to maximize tickets ASAP nor does it account for 1-3 days delay from swipe to ticket posting in your account.
But it is important to run these numbers as higher the ticket, the higher your chances of winning the grand prizes. No seriously, Prizepool’s system will draw prize for the person with most ticket first, then to the person with second highest ticket, and so on. In other words, people with low tickets are already at a disadvantage of winning high prizes (but people with low tickets are also at an advantage of getting high APY but that’s a different story).
Consider supporting the blog by using the PrizePool referral link below. Both of us get a 10% bonus on all your weekly prizes. My referral code is Y17LK or click this link https://links.getprizepool.com/1abMCSL4Ccb
2. How Much is Each Ticket Worth?
For the sake of simplicity, let’s assume you put $10,000 on PrizePool and you get an APY of 3.27% (which is the current estimated pool APY). So, you are netting roughly 30,000 tickets per month (assume 1 month = 30 days) and your are earning roughly $27.25 interest every month. This then means 1000 ticket is worth roughly 91 cents.
Now following a similar approach for debit card is an outright oversimplification but let’s do it anyway. If you spend $10,000 you may earn $27.25 through interest (this is taxable) which is a mere 0.2725% cashback. It would suck if this was the end of things but it isn’t. The opportunity to get your purchase reimbursed is something that needs to be looked at and thankfully it is easier to quantity.
3. What is my Chance of Getting a Purchase Reimbursed?
You can spend up to $2,500 per day on the PrizePool debit card and you can get up to $2,000 reimbursed per purchase.
The usual chance of getting the purchase reimbursed is 0.5% however it is elevated during promotions.
3A. What are my Chances of Winning at Least Once?
You may ask – what are my chances of getting reimbursed at least once if I make 1 purchase, 2 purchase, 3 purchase, 4 purchase, etc?
What if I make ten $2000 purchases? What are the chances that at least $2000 will be reimbursed? What if I make ten $100 purchases, what are my chances then? The answer to both of these questions is the same. And we know this based on high school level statistics of a rolling a dice problem (click this link to see an example).
Scenario 1: 5% Chance of Reimbursement
The chance of reimbursement was set to 5% sometime in second week of March 2022 and seemingly lasted until late April 2022.
I had subtly showed how crazy this could be by dropping some figures of 5% reimbursement in this post. I didn’t caption it or detail it out but if you saw it and connected the dots then good for you.
The chance of getting at least one purchase reimbursed on 10 purchases is 40%. If you instead do 20 purchases, it jumps to 64% whereas doing 40 purchases takes you to 90%. You can follow this information by looking at the blue curve in the picture provided below. The horizontal axis is the number of purchases while the vertical one is the probability of winning at least once.
You can also look at the green curve to see how significantly the probability changes (in comparison to the previous # of swipe) as we increase the number of swipes. You can see that at some point the jump isn’t significant enough (and this information is also apparent just by looking at the blue curve so you).
The return could have been insane, granted you knew how to do it. Here is a not so efficient example- suppose you want to pay a $100 internet bill, then you can choose:
- 40% probability of getting at least 10% cashback by splitting the payment into ten $10 payments or you can or
- 64% probability of getting at least 5% cashback by splitting the payment into twenty $5 payments.
And remember reimbursement or not, you still get tickets on swipe.
Scenario 2: 1.66% Chance of Reimbursement
On April 27, 2022, the probability of getting a purchase reimbursed was set to 1/60 (or 1.66%).
How do the numbers chance when the probability of getting a purchase reimbursed is 1 in 60 (1.66%)? Obviously, this is going to be far worse than 5% but still not too terrible. For example, with 10 swipes you have about 15.47% chance of getting at least one reimbursement whereas near 50% chance requires 41 swipes and getting 90% chance will need 138 swipes.
Scenario 3: 0.5% Chance of Reimbursement
As you can guess your chances of getting a purchase reimbursed aren’t going to be as good when it is lowered to 0.5%
For example, in order to get 90% probability of getting at least one swipe reimbursed, we need to do 460 swipes.
3B. What Are My Chances of Winning at Least Twice, Thrice, etc?
A natural question to ask is – what are my chances of winning at least twice (or thrice) given I make some number of swipes? The answer to figuring out the chances of winning at least twice lies in examples like this. Unfortunately plotting these would take a lot of time so I am not going to bother with it.
4. What Exactly is Eligible for Reimbursement?
Their FAQ page says:
You can win a reimbursement for your purchase of up to $2000. Every single purchase made with our debit card is eligible to get reimbursed by us – no daily or lifetime limits either!
Closing Remarks
A little technical post but the idea is simple – swipe more to increase your chance of winning. You also want to pay attention to promotions that give high chance of reimbursement per purchase. This is demonstrated by simple fact that it takes 138 swipes @ 1.66% vs 460 swipes @ 0.5% to get 90% chance of getting at least one purchase reimbursed.
By the way, I will do a separate post comparing various reimbursement chances of Yotta. I may also talk about Fold debit card from a similar point of view.
