Like many other people, you may have gotten to a point where you feel that you are spending too much on your phone bills. This would lead into a situation where you start entertaining the question as to whether it is possible to lower your phone bills. That would in turn lead to another question, as to how exactly you can go about lowering your phone bills (if at all it is possible to lower them). Those are the questions we will be attempting to answer in this article.
With respect to the first question (on whether it is possible to lower your phone bills), the answer is ‘yes’. It is possible to lower your phone bills. There are people who were previously spending huge sums of money on phone bills, but they have subsequently managed to lower the phone bills by huge margins. So this is where, for instance, you find an individual who was spending, say, $100 per month on phone bills, and who has subsequently managed to lower it to $50 per month. So it is definitely something that can be done.
With respect to the second question (on how phone bills can be lowered), the answer is in that there are two simple things you can do, to reduce the amount of money you spend on phone bills. You can start by opting for a phone service provider and phone plan that is well aligned to your needs. Then you can make a conscious choice to be utilizing your data prudently. That way, you may be able to cut the amount of money you spend on phone bills by huge margins. We will now proceed to look at those strategies (through which you can lower your phone bills) in greater detail.
Making the right choice of a phone service provider and phone plan
So the first step here is to list the phone service providers/carriers in your area: these being the service providers/carriers you can potentially sign up with. The next step would be to find out what phone plans each of the service providers/carriers has to offer. What is the cost of each phone plan, and what is included in each phone plan? Remember, it is possible to find two service providers/carriers, who are offering similar phone plans (with similar features), yet charging vastly different sums of money for the plans. In your search, it would be a good idea to also include the Mobile Virtual Network Operators (MVNOs), as these tend to offer very good rates.
The next step would be to look at your phone usage habits. What do you use your phone mostly for? Is it mostly for making calls? Or are you a smart-phone user, who mostly uses data – as opposed to someone who mostly uses the phone for making calls? How much data do you use per month? So you need to have a good profile of yourself as a phone user.
What you need to do next is to check through the phone plans you collected in the first step, and choose the one that is best aligned to your needs. Like if, for instance, you are a heavy user of data, you can opt for a plan that gives you ‘unlimited’ data. If on the other hand, you are a person who mostly uses your phone for making calls (while using very little data), you can opt for a plan that offers ‘unlimited’ calls.
The idea is to avoid signing up for a phone plan where you end up paying for things you don’t need. Like if you are a person who mainly uses your phone for making calls, yet you sign up for a ‘unlimited’ data plan – you will end up paying more for the ‘unlimited’ data, yet that is something you won’t actually be using.
If you are paying more in terms of phone bills than you (feel you) should be paying, then it is likely that you are paying for things you don’t need. So you need to identify the things that you don’t need that you are paying for, and opt out of the phone plan that includes such.
It is also at this point where the question of paying your phone price installments as part of your phone bills comes in. Many of the people who pay hefty phone bills find that their phone bills have two components. One component is for using the phone services, and the other component is for payment of the phone installments. The way to avoid paying such installments is by opting for a ‘no-contract’ phone plan. So you would buy your phone upfront, and then on a monthly basis, you would only be paying for the phone usage services. This would also give you an opportunity to buy a phone that is ‘unlocked’ – that is, a phone with which you can switch service providers/carriers.
Utilizing your data prudently
Nowadays, most phone plans come with a ‘data’ component. So in the phone bill, you pay for the calls you make, the texts you send, and the data you use. And for many of the people who pay more than they should be paying, the problem turns out to be due to the ‘data’ component. You see, many of the phone plans out there come with data caps/limits. Once you go past the data caps/limits, you are charged very high rates for data usage thereafter. You could find that what you end up paying, at the end of the month, is twice or even thrice what you’d have paid, if you hadn’t exceeded the data cap.
If you are using a phone plan that comes with such a data cap, you need to put in every effort to ensure that you don’t go past the data cap/limit. This may be a question of using Wi-Fi whenever and wherever you can (keeping data security concerns in mind as well). It may also be a question of turning off background data usage in various apps. So you need to do whatever it takes to ensure that you don’t go past the data cap/limit. But if your needs are such that you keep going past the data cap/limit, then the best solution for you may be where you switch to a plan that allows you ‘unlimited’ data. A plan with unlimited data is obviously likely to cost more. But the extra amount you pay is still likely to be lower than what you’d otherwise have to keep on spending paying ‘penalties’ for going past the data limit/data cap.
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