what if the fun part of playing the lottery could somehow be harnessed to help people save money? That is the idea behind a prize-linked savings (PLS) account. Here’s how it works. Rather than spend $100 on lottery tickets, you deposit $100 in a bank account. Let’s say the going interest rate is 1 percent. In a PLS account, you agree to surrender a small chunk of that interest, perhaps .25 percent, which then gets pooled with all the other small chunks from fellow PLS depositors. What happens to that pool of money? It is periodically paid out in a lump sum to some randomly chosen winner—just
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