The cost of living crisis has made many Scots reassess their incomings and outgoings. While many payments are essential and cannot be reduced, your mobile phone contract may be one area that can be rejigged to slim costs.
Martin Lewis, the well-known money saving expert, has issued a massive warning for the 14 million people who are out of contract on their mobile phones.
Many of them are paying four times more than they need to, the TV personality warned, because existing customer deals have gone up, while at the same time, the cheapest deals have got “cheaper and cheaper and cheaper.”
Speaking on This Morning recently, Martin outlined what he’d like “everybody to do” to see if they could be saving hundreds on your phone bill.
“Get your mobile out now… and in it send INFO to 85075,” Martin advised. “You should get a reply back and the reply will tell you… what your early termination or cancellation fees are. It’ll tell you effectively if you’re out of contract and free to switch.
“If you’re out of contract then you are free to just change the SIM in the back of your phone… which gives it its identity, it might even be a virtual SIM.
“Just to put it into context, at the moment, you can get unlimited minutes, unlimited texts, and unlimited data for £10 a month. Well, there are people paying £20 or £30 a month. What’s the point for?”
Martin went on: “As long as you paid your handset off, you can get 50GB of data for around £4 a month all in. Those cheapest deals are available on comparison sites.
“They tend not to be direct from providers so get yourself onto a comparison site that lists all the deals, and you will be able to whatever those short-lived deals are at the moment and save a fortune.”
Martin noted two things – if you’re with Three, ID Mobile, Smarty, you will be asked for your date of birth as an ID when you text the number, and doing so might not be possible at all for some people on family type contracts.
However, for those who do get the response they want, you don’t need to give up your mobile number. Just get your PAC code and give it to the new provider, and the switch is as easy as that.
Viewers flooded the comment section with their experiences of following Martin’s step-by-step guide.
“I’m paying £10 a month,” one user wrote. “How are people paying so much?”
A second penned: “I was paying £75 a month. Paid my phone off went sim only I’m now paying £6.99 a month”.
A third typed: “Buy your own phone, get a sim only contract. Best thing.”
A fourth gushed: “Because of this man I am currently paying 45p a month for the same package I had with Vodafone! They were charging me £27 a month.”
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