Spring cleaning my bills saved me $221 on phone plans – and I’m just getting started
Key takeaways
- Peta found $221 in savings after reviewing the mobile phone plans she and her husband were paying.
- They'd never used more than 25GB of data/month each, so she used that to compare and find cheaper plans.
- While her existing provider wouldn't match its new-customer offer, she switched to a better deal – showing there are savings lurking in your phone bills.
At Finder, we spend our working lives telling other people how to save money on their bills. Yet somehow, when it comes to our own bills, we can forget to practice what we preach.
This was the case for one of our publishers, Peta Taylor.
"I realised I'd completely dropped the ball," she confessed, "and I've decided to do something about it."
That's how Peta's Boring Bills Audit was born. A spring-cleaning exercise, Peta is going to tackle one boring household bill at a time, and I'm going to report the results back to you to show you how much money she claws back.
Peta's goal: "I'm aiming to find $2,000 in savings over the next six months. If my lazy self can finally audit my bills, there's a good chance you can too!"
First bill: 2 mobile phone bills.
Boring Bills Audit Step 1: Current spend
Peta's mobile plan costs $25 a month and her husband's costs $36.
That's a total spend of $61 a month.
I know people who spend more than that on one single plan (ahem it's me, I'm people), so these are fairly cheap mobile phone plans. But Peta was keen to do better.
"I hadn't actually checked whether we were getting good value for what we were paying," Peta says.
Boring Bills Audit Step 2: Current usage
Before comparing, Peta pulled up her account and checked her data usage, for both her and her husband.
"I've never used more than 25GB in a month, which gave me a pretty straightforward benchmark when I started comparing plans," she says.
"There was no point paying extra for hundreds of gigabytes of data I wasn't using."
She also checked network coverage before looking at prices. Most of the smaller providers use the wholesale network of the larger providers, which has a smaller footprint covering 98.8% of Australians.
"I've bounced around the big telcos before, including Vodafone and Telstra, and coverage is one thing I'm not willing to compromise on."
Boring Bills Audit Step 3: Current provider
The first place Peta looked was actually her existing provider.
"It was offering new customers a discounted rate of $15 a month for their first 6 months, so I figured it was worth asking whether I could get the same deal," she says.
"Nope, no dice. There was no discount for loyal customers and the offer was only available to new customers. That was enough to make me look elsewhere."
Boring Bills Audit Step 4: Compare
Peta found another provider using the same network (so she was confident in the coverage) offering a 6-month deal for $12.40 a month.
"It also came with 5GB more data than my existing plan," she says.
"So I switched."
💰That's a saving of $12.60 a month for 6 months, or $75.60.
Peta then repeated steps 1-4 for her husband's phone plan. He was paying $36 a month, and she found another provider offering the same amount of data for $15 a month.
💰That's a $21 monthly difference, or $126 over six months.
"The new plan also came with a $20 Finder Reward, which made the switch even more worthwhile," Peta says.
💰Total savings: $221.60
They'll pocket over $200 in savings and gift cards, and the whole thing took only a few minutes, Peta shares.
"That works out to around $37 a month in savings across our two plans for 6 months," she says.
"I've set myself a reminder to audit the plans again in six months, because the cheapest plan today isn't necessarily the cheapest plan forever."
Your phone bill is worth a 5-minute check
If you're doing your own spring clean, start with 3 things:
→ Check how much data you actually use. You might be paying for far more than you need.
→ Check the network. A cheap plan isn't much use if the coverage doesn't work where you live, work or travel.
→ Check what you're paying now. Then compare it with what's available to new customers and elsewhere in the market.
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