Have you got the best deal for your phone?
Let’s face it - mobile phones have to be the most annoying invention in history. If you’re not standing on a chair with your phone to the ceiling trying to get a signal, you’re sat on the back of a bus listening to five different people blare out the Crazy Frog ring tone at full volume. Whatever happened to good old-fashioned letter writing?!
Deals on phones are changing every second, so it’s always worth checking if you could get something better. Our guide takes you through how to decide on what phone you might need; whether to go for a contract or pay as you go and an explanation of all the mobile phone jargon that the youth of today use.
If you plan on having a lengthy relationship with your mobile phone service provider then it’s worth planning ahead. If you’re already on PAYG, and spending more than £30 a month, it’s probably a good idea for you to switch to a contract to get a better deal. If you’re already on a contract and you aren’t using all of your minutes or texts every month then it might be worth downgrading your contract, or switching to PAYG when it runs out. It’s all about using your common sense to break down the deals and work out what’s the best option for you.
To decide which to go for, you need to have a good idea of what you want to use your mobile for, how much you normally spend a month and have a reasonable idea of how many texts and minutes you use each month. There’s no fail-safe way of getting the best deal – because there’s something out every five minutes that will make you want to kick yourself as soon as you’ve signed up for your new £40-a-month 24-month-contract.
New to the whole phone thing? If you’re deciding on a mobile phone for the very first time, then you can pick up a cheap phone from eBay for next to nothing (we even found a pack of 13 working mobile phones for £1!) – And a free PAYG SIM card from either O2 or T-Mobile. For those of you that really couldn’t care less what your phone looks like; and you know you’ll hardly ever use it – stick with your eBay phone and free SIM and you can’t really go wrong. The SIM card will last you forever and if the phone breaks then you’ve only got to fork out another pound for a new one. How to decide between a contract and PAYG (pay as you go) - Do you top-up by £25 or more every month?
- Do you spend lengthy amounts of time on the phone to people?
- Are you always running out of credit and having to top-up again?
If the answer to most of those questions is yes, you’re probably better off with a contract phone.
A contract deal is an actual contract between you and the mobile phone service provider, where you agree to pay a fixed monthly fee for a set amount of time. They normally throw in a free phone of your choice (you’ll have to pay extra for the more expensive models), a fixed amount of minutes to use and a certain number of text messages. Some contract deals have other extras like free or cheap broadband, free internet access or free things like Playstations or hair straighteners.
- Do you only use your mobile in emergencies?
- Do you top-up your phone as and when you need it, rather than every single month?
- Are monthly payments sometimes difficult for you to keep up?
- Is your credit rating so bad you can’t get a contract?
If the answer to most of those questions is yes – you probably need to get a pay as you go SIM.
A PAYG deal means that there’s no fixed contract or obligation to spend any money at all once you’ve bought the handset and the SIM; you only pay for the chargeable services you use. You can top up as often or as little as you like by buying a voucher from your local shop, doing it over the phone with your credit or debit card, at an ATM machine or on the web. You can normally top up in denominations of £10 (although some networks will allow £5 top-ups). You can’t normally get a free phone from a PAYG deal, but with certain networks you can get free texts or receive bonus top-up schemes where you get a percentage of your top-ups back every month.
How to choose a contract
At all costs, you want to try to avoid using more minutes or texts than you’re given with your contract. Not only is this really annoying, but it’s a waste of money; because mobile phone networks revel in the fact that people don’t really check how much non-inclusive minutes cost them. For this reason, it’s always best to leave a few extra minutes than what you think you’ll need.
Step 1: Decide what you need.
If you have a call duration log on your current mobile phone then you can work out which deal to go for much more easily. This tool records how long you’ve spent on the phone since the log has last been reset, and usually shows outbound and inbound calls. Reset the log and in a week, see how many minutes you’ve used up – times this number by four and you’ll be able to see roughly how many minutes you’d require a month in your contract. If you’ve got a message counter you can do the same; if not, you can save all your sent messages in a file and in a week count them up and do the same. If for some reason you make far fewer calls or texts than usual then try again on a week that’s about average for you.
Step 2: Decide which phone you want.
It is possible to take out a SIM-only contract but overall it’s not really worth it. If you’re happy with the phone that you already have, get the free one anyway (find the one with the highest value) and sell it on eBay or give it to someone as a present. Not all phones on contract are free however – so if you want the latest flashy phone then expect to pay out.
Read on in our guide to find out the best phone to suit you.
Step 3: Ask your friends and family.
The best place to start looking for a good deal on a contract is your friends and family. If they have contracts with a certain network then you might be able to get cheaper deals, calls or texts if they recommend you to the network. Ask them and get them to check with their mobile service provider.
Step 4: Shop around.
Next it’s time to delve into the wonderful world of contract deals. If you Google “contract phone”, you get more than 40 million hits – searching through them all might not be very high on your list of things to do.
Things are much simpler if you know what mobile phone you want; this way you can find a trusted website and all you have to do is type in the model you want and find the cheapest tariff you can get that has all the inclusive minutes and texts you need. Don’t just go to one site – shop around – as tempting as it might be to go for the first great deal you see, there’s probably a better one somewhere else. Normally, you can’t find the best deals on the actual mobile phone network websites – the best place to look is a site that compares all the networks because then they aren’t biased. We like Carphone Warehouse the best because of its easy-to-use site and transparent prices. Other useful sites are Phones4U, Dial-a-phone and Mobiles2YourDoor.com.
Step 5: Cut the costs.
There are some pretty simple ways of cutting back on your contract bill. The first involves a little white lie. Once you’ve got your contract, you have a seven-day “cooling-off period”. This means you can return your phone and pay nothing at all as long as it’s within the timeframe given and you give written notice. So, after you’ve received your phone, give your network provider a call and tell them you’re thinking about cancelling the contract, because you’ve found a better deal on another network. It doesn’t always work, but sometimes the provider will offer you a better deal rather than lose your custom. Even if they don’t really care, you haven’t lost anything and you still don’t have to cancel the contract.
If you use credit cards – find yourself a handy cashback one like the American Express Platinum Credit Card. This card offers 5% cashback for the first three months for spending up to £4,000 and then rates vary after that; if you spend under £3,500 you can receive 0.5% cashback and the percentage goes up if you spend more. 5% may not sound like much but every penny counts! See our full cashback cards article for more on how it works.
How to choose a pay as you go package
As a rule, if you’re spending £25 or more every month on PAYG, you can probably get a better deal on contract. If you decide that you don’t want to commit yourself to a contract however, then finding the best PAYG deal is a little time-consuming, but reasonably simple - and will inevitably save you a lot of money. Here’s how to do it.
There are seven main mobile phone networks:
Each of these will provide a range of different PAYG deals, with different call rates, text rates and special offers. You’ll get dizzy by simply looking at all the different deals – it’s impossible to compare them until you know what you want and need.
Step 1: Decide what you need.
See step one of the contract section to find out exactly what you need from your mobile phone network.
Step 2: Decide how much you want to spend every month.
If you’ve decided on PAYG then it’s not really worth paying out more than £30 a month on topping up unless you’re dead set against getting a contract. As an example, in November 2007 T-Mobile has their typical PAYG SIM where you top up £30 a month, and get £30 a month to use. Alternatively, you can sign up for a T-Mobile contract for £30 a month and receive £180 of credit to use on calls, texts and picture messages. The whole idea of a PAYG phone is that you’re not tied down to a contract. It works out more expensive this way but you don’t have to pay every month if you don’t want to. However, it’s worth noting that with some PAYG deals, if you don’t top up every month then you risk losing out on some deals like free texts or bonus top-ups for that particular month. Be sure to set yourself a reasonable spending limit for what you need.
Step 3: Ask your friends and family.
Think about the people you’re calling or texting the most – make a list of them, and ask which network they’re on. A lot of mobile phone networks will offer you cheaper calls or texts to numbers on the same network. Some networks offer specific deals between you and your friends. If you’re a close family or have a small friendship group that’s always at it on the phone, why not discuss the possibility of all changing to the same network? Orange does a deal called mob mates where they give you and your friends a free SIM card, and as long as you’re all using the mob mate SIM cards you get 2p calls and texts to each other.
Step 4: Shop around.
This is the lengthy part. For PAYG, it’s a good idea to buy your SIM card separately from your phone, to make sure you get all the deals you can possibly get. To make sure you get the best deal you have no choice but to shop around. If you visit a comparison page like Carphone Warehouse, they’ll be as helpful as they can in finding you the best deal that they know – but they don’t know them all.
You’ll need to visit each network’s website and break down their deals. This isn’t really as hard as it sounds. Take a look at this example:
I need 100 texts, and 50 minutes a month.
I want to spend a maximum of £15 a month.
If I go to Orange and top up £15 a month on their Speak Easy tariff, I get 300 free texts so I don’t have to spend any of my credit on text messages. Orange charges 15p per minute to any UK landline or mobile phone network; so for my £15 I can get 100 minutes.
- Overall, for my £15, with Orange I can get:
100 minutes
300 text messages
If I go to T-Mobile and top up £15 a month on their Everyone tariff, providing I top up on a Friday I get unlimited texts that weekend. T-Mobile charges 15p per minute to any UK landline or mobile phone network; so to get my 50 minutes I need to spend £7.50 of my credit. T-Mobile charges 10p for text messages so if I want to stick to my £15 budget then I can only allow myself 75 texts.
- Overall, for my £15, with T-Mobile I can get:
50 minutes
75 text messages
Unlimited texts one weekend a month
As you work through all the networks, some might be more difficult than others to break down because of all the deals. Try to firstly work out the minutes and the texts if you spend half your credit on each and then consider the offers afterwards. As you can see from the example however, Orange provides a much better typical PAYG tariff for its customers than the typical T-Mobile PAYG tariff. Try to think about it logically, and think about your needs and what will suit them.
Getting Started
Now see our article on choosing a phone.
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