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029: Comparing mobile phone plans
415 Plays5 years ago
This episode will help you understand your mobile phone bill and switch plans in under an hour!
This episode talks about the paradox of choice when it comes to choosing from the more than 300 mobile phone plans available.
Mia and Dinah talk about the things you need to consider including:
- Network reliability
- Network coverage
- Value for money
- Contracts or Pay as You Go
- Phone included or Bring Your Own Device (BYOD)
- Data limits.
Dinah talks about the steps she went through to change plans including:
- Looking at usage information for the past few months to assess what plan she needed
- Assessing what networks she was willing to consider.
- How she used comparison a site to quickly choose the best plan
- Assessing if getting a new phone as part of a plan was good value for money.
- Mia talks about using the secure vault in her Password Manager to fill in Immigration and Customs forms while she was on the plane.
- Dinah talks about she needed to reinstall her Password Manager on her computer and that it made her realise how much she how relies on it.
Trip it - Travel itinerary app
RESOURCESOpen Signal - website providing information about network reliability
Whistle Out - website comparing mobile phone plans
SHAREPlease head to the Life Admin Life Hacks Facebook page to connect with listeners and share your thoughts, questions or suggestions.
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Transcript
Introduction & Podcast Promotion
00:00:00
Speaker
Charlamagne to God here. I can't wait to see you at the Black Effect Podcast Festival coming to you live on Saturday, April 22nd at the Pullman Yards in Atlanta, hosted by myself in Jesalax. If you haven't gotten your tickets, what are you waiting for? The Black Effect is bringing some of the hottest podcasts live, like the 85 South Show. Horrible decisions and big facts for one day only, okay? For inspiring podcasters, we've got you covered. If you don't want to miss the Black Effect Podcast Festival, make sure to get your tickets today at blackeffect.com.
00:00:27
Speaker
Like a good neighbour? State Farm is there.
Life Admin Life Hacks Introduction
00:00:30
Speaker
This is Life Admin Life Hacks, a podcast that gives you techniques, tips and tools to tackle your life admin more efficiently, to save your time, your money and improve your household harmony. I'm Tyna Roe Roberts, an operations manager and until now has been too lazy to consider anything other than Telstra for my mobile phone plan.
00:00:52
Speaker
I'm Mia Northrop, a researcher and writer, and making phone calls is the absolute last thing I use my phone for. This episode will help you understand your mobile phone bill and switch plans in under an hour. Hello and welcome to Life Admin Life Hacks.
Navigating Mobile Phone Plans: The Paradox of Choice
00:01:07
Speaker
Well, everyone has a mobile phone these days and it's really actually a really important tool to get your life admin sorted. So making sure you're on the right plan is actually a really important thing to get your life admin under control. 44% of our survey respondents are responsible for their mobile phone plan and more than half of them are worried about wasting money.
00:01:32
Speaker
This whole terrain has become so confusing. There are 44 providers in Australia all operating on the Telstra Optus and Vodafone networks. So even though there's sort of just three levels of infrastructure, there's 44 providers offering plans and phones.
00:01:48
Speaker
This is the beauty of competition and deregulation. So, you know, you've got ISPs, internet service providers who are offering plans, and supermarkets, and then people like Moose and Yemojo and Veya and all these other companies. You're like, who are they? I don't know where they come from. But there are more than 300 mobile phone plans on the market and more than 30 phones available.
00:02:11
Speaker
So all that complexity, without even bundling in your landline or your broadband, just make it the ultimate paradox of choice. Yeah, and I do think that that's why so many people don't change. It's just like health insurance. It just looks too hard. So let's try and make it as simple as we can.
00:02:28
Speaker
We're going to go through some of the criteria you need to help make that decision. And Diana, I know you personally were going from a situation where your phone was bundled in with your broadband.
Key Criteria for Selecting Mobile Plans
00:02:40
Speaker
Yeah. And so I'll take you through the steps I've gone through to unbundle it. Yeah. So essentially when it comes down to providers,
00:02:49
Speaker
There's a few ways of comparing them. Really, you're looking at things like network reliability. How often do they have outages? What's the connectivity like? You're looking at network coverage, the availability and the strength of signal, and then it comes down to the value for money of their various plans. So you can visit a site like OpenSignal and they publish data for Optus, Telstra and Vodafone about the network reliability and coverage and that kind of thing.
00:03:17
Speaker
When you're looking at the plans themselves, there's also quite a few things to take into consideration because some of them bring your own device. You can think about, all right, do I want Apple, Samsung, Google, LG, all the other ones that are available. You can think about if you want to go on a contract, whether that's 12 or 24 months, whether it's prepaid, whether you don't want a contract, then there's the monthly data allowance, the calls, the SMS, the MMS.
00:03:45
Speaker
which network it's on. So most providers are offering services on 3G or 4G. Telstra has just started to roll out 5G which is going to give you a lot more speed and then you want to know if you hit your data limit in a given month what happens. Do they just throttle you and make everything go slow or do you have to actually pay extra?
00:04:04
Speaker
I mean, I think historically that was where the biggest pain point was where people were going over their data plans.
Data: The Differentiator in Mobile Plans
00:04:09
Speaker
It doesn't seem to be the same issue as it used to be. It seems more likely that they slow your speed down. Yes. For me, comparing was all about the data. I barely make any phone calls. I barely make any text messages. I seem to use WhatsApp more than ever. For me, it was all about comparing the data from month to month.
00:04:29
Speaker
And unless you're going for a really basic plan, a really small data plan, just about all the plans now have unlimited talk and text. So really data's the thing. So really the two, you've got some choices around what network do I want to go for? Do I want to be Telstra, Optus or Vodafone? How much data do I want to have? And, you know, do I want to get a device? Do I want to lock in with a phone or am I happy to bring my own device?
00:04:56
Speaker
I think those are probably the three most important decisions. That's right. So before you switch, it's a good idea to estimate how much you're likely to use in terms of that data and really the best way of determining that is to look at your historical usage, go to old bills and have a look at what you've been using each month and make a call on whether that's been enough. If you've been hitting that limit and getting reminders or getting throttled and you know you need a little bit more,
00:05:21
Speaker
or you might shockingly discover, like you did, that you were using barely half of the data. Yes, I was definitely paying for a bigger data limit than I actually needed. Yeah, I find that I get reminders toward the end of the month and I have decided just to curb my behavior rather than jump up because it doesn't happen every month. And I'm hitting that data limit because I'm streaming either Netflix or Spotify.
00:05:47
Speaker
Or I have started to use lots of audio on WhatsApp where I'm uploading audio messages and downloading audio messages from people. So I find if I just cut back my Netflix for a while, the problems all go away. So Diana, you've made the shift. Talk me through the process you went to, work out what you needed and how you had to unbundle it from your other tech.
Unbundling Mobile Plans: A Strategic Approach
00:06:09
Speaker
Yeah, so as you talked about, the first step was really to understand what our usage had been over the last year or so. So it was really easy for me to log into our current Telstra account because my password saved in my password manager. So I could very easily log into my Telstra account
00:06:26
Speaker
They don't make it super easy. To be fair, you have to open up each bill individually to find your usage over the last 12 months. Really? Isn't there a nice little chart showing you data month by month? Just how much you paid without any of the details. So I guess deliberately to make it a little bit tricky for you. But didn't really take that long, probably five or 10 minutes for me to quickly whip through each bill and identify how much data we'd been using.
00:06:49
Speaker
And then I went to Whistle Out, which is a really good comparison site that's got lots of different mobile phone plans. And I really decided that the first decision I needed to make was, was I willing to move away from the Telstra network? So to go to Optus or to Vodafone, because the Optus and Vodafone plans look a bit cheaper. But then obviously you've got that trade-off of we know that the Telstra coverage is better, particularly outside of the capital cities of Australia.
00:07:19
Speaker
So once you've got to make that decision, and for me, it was important to have coverage when we go camping and we're out in the country. So I knew that I'm only looking at providers that operate off the Telstra network. I knew how much data that we needed. So really, I just looked for Telstra plans that met that criteria. And it was really quick to be able to make a decision about which plan to go for.
00:07:45
Speaker
So Diana, were you interested in getting a new handset or were you happy with your current one as you look at what that calculation is to get your handset distinctly from the contract?
Buying a Phone: Outright vs. Bundled Plans
00:07:55
Speaker
Yeah, so I did do the maths, you know what I'm like, I love a spreadsheet. So I did compare whether I was going to get a brand new phone as part of the deal and what that would cost compared to me going out and buying a phone. But I think almost always it makes more sense to buy your phone outright.
00:08:12
Speaker
and then get a plan separately. I guess there are some exceptions to that. If you couldn't cover the upfront cost yourself and you were needing a new handset, then maybe it's worth paying a few hundred dollars more, which is typically what you'll pay over the life of the contract to get a phone as part of the plan. And I guess occasionally there are some promotions around where you might get a good deal on the handset as part of locking into a contract.
00:08:36
Speaker
But I think increasingly, following international trends, phone companies are focusing on what they do best. They want to sell you the data, the air time, and they don't really want to be interested in offering interest-free loans on phones.
00:08:51
Speaker
Interesting. And so you have taken your current phone across to this new provider. Yeah. And I've moved myself and my husband and also added my daughter now to the plan and where we're previously paying $100 a month for the two of us and now we're going to be paying $75 a month for the three of us. So save $25 a month and got my daughter a phone plan as well. Brilliant.
00:09:16
Speaker
And what triggered this? Why did you need to shift now? I think there were two things. The first one was we had been on a contract with a bundled contract with Telstra and that contract was expiring. And the second one is my daughter's about to start high school. She's had a phone this year but we haven't given her any data. She's just been using
00:09:35
Speaker
wifi. But now that she's going to be out on public transport on her own, I feel like she really should have access to data when she's out and about. So now I've given her a contract too. Yeah. I think all of my last phone purchases or shifting contracts have all been because I've killed my phone in some way. You should see the cover I have of my phone now. It's like a tradies cover. It's indestructible, but I just dropped it, cracked it,
00:10:00
Speaker
you know, it fell in water, I killed it and so each time that happened I'd be looking at new phone, new contract and I had always gone that that route of having a contract that's been bundled in with the phone and the data and the calls because mine's actually on a corporate plan so I was sort of, I had to take that factor into consideration.
Tools for Simplifying Mobile Plan Choices
00:10:20
Speaker
So I guess the main thing here is about how to choose which providers and you just use Whistle Out, the Whistle Out website to go in there and put in your criteria and it suggested plans that might be appropriate. Yeah, it was a really easy to use website. And I guess I decided I didn't want to spend a lot of time on this, although I knew I could save some money and I wanted to get a plan for my daughter.
00:10:40
Speaker
Right before I started, I thought, I'm not going to save thousands of dollars doing this. I might save a couple of hundred dollars for the year. And so I didn't want to spend more than an hour. So I kind of set myself that criteria of let's sit down and do it all in one go. Look at the data, decide on the plan and make the switch. And less than an hour, saving $25 a month and getting more for my money. So I feel like a really good use of an hour's time. Yeah.
00:11:07
Speaker
And that's those principles that have come up when we've had other episodes about comparison shopping. Is it really you want to think about how much can you expect to say what will actually make you happy? If it's $300 in the year, then an hour is enough time. Trying to be comprehensive and search every provider and every possible plan is going to send you crazy and really probably not impact your finances in a considerable way.
00:11:31
Speaker
Yeah, and I think that the longer you spend, the difficult it is actually to make the decision because you get more and more confused. So I think that using that principle of, okay, first of all, I decide on my network, then I decide how much data I need, and then just choose the cheapest plan that's got that amount of data, was made it much easier to make the decision.
00:11:50
Speaker
Okay, so there's a pretty familiar process, I guess, to swap your plan if you're at that point where your contract's expiring, your phone's dying, or there's some other trigger to look at what you're spending on the mobile phone. I hope those hacks have given you some direction and a place to start, and those three easy criteria to
Tech Hacks for Travel: Password Managers & Tripit
00:12:11
Speaker
follow. Thanks, Mia. Do you have a high of the week? Life had been high of the week. Well, we went away in the school holidays, we went to Bali,
00:12:20
Speaker
And I think for me, one of the life admin highs was that moment on the plane where they come around with those forms, those arrival cards, and you have to fill out your passport information. And in the past, I would have scrabbled around some bag in the overhead storage, trying to find the four passports and
00:12:39
Speaker
fill in the form this time I could just open my phone go to my password manager where there's a vault for secure documents and I just had put all of the passport numbers and expiry dates in there so it took me about two minutes to fill out the form no need to fuss around bags for passports as for that holiday also I had had all the flight itinerary information going to our admin email address
00:13:05
Speaker
all the flight information was saved to the shared calendar. So we also didn't have to have those inane conversations around what date are we going and what time do we have to be at the airport and repeating yourself 400 times. It was all there. So that was a high. It did make that part of the trip so much smoother. Amazing. I do love that idea of not having to dig through bags for passports in particular and balance them all in that tiny little tray table.
00:13:32
Speaker
How about a life admin load either? So I have had a load, it's kind of a load, but also maybe a high. I don't know if that counts, but I've been using LastPass as my password manager and I think I keep talking about it in almost every episode. But I have it on my Mac as well as on my phone and for some reason it stopped working on my Mac. So I think it was something to do with upgrading the LastPass
00:13:58
Speaker
Is this a work Mac or a home Mac? This is a work Mac and I actually made me realize how often I use it because not only do I use it for my home passwords, I now use it for my work passwords as well. I've got so many work passwords and it just stopped working and so then I was using my phone to find the passwords on the app and then manually entering them in because I was in a rush.
00:14:23
Speaker
But the reality is after two days of it, I realized how much I was using it. And so I had to stop and do a bit of troubleshooting, download a new piece of software, reboot my computer to get it working again. So it was just a bit annoying, but it did make me realize how much time I'm saving every single day from having that password manager set up and working both on my phone and on my computer. It's incredible how quickly we've come to rely on that. It's just like
00:14:52
Speaker
feels like it's changed my world. I don't know how we had how we survived without it. I know and for me too you know at work especially when I'm hot desking or moving around different parts of the campus just having the password manager there the whole time or having to work from home it's just isn't yeah incredibly useful.
00:15:14
Speaker
Do you have a power tool for us this episode? I do. And it's actually also back on that holiday theme. Like you just talked about your Bali holiday. But when we did our episode on holidays, a few people had mentioned to me that they use the Tripit app. And I think we mentioned it actually in the episode, but I'd never tried it. And so recently I decided to download it because we're going on this long overseas holiday and it's got lots of bookings and I was finding
00:15:39
Speaker
that organizing the itineraries was, you know, and all the different things we'd booked was getting complicated. Oh, it's the best app. So you actually just email the booking. So when a booking arrives, you just email it to an email address called plans at trippish, just forward the email and automatically populates all the information into the itinerary in a really user friendly way.
00:16:04
Speaker
And I had thought that it was probably only useful for complex trips, but it's so much quicker than saving it into the Google Drive that it's actually even great just for a flight to Sydney because it's saved there in the app with the itinerary in such an easy way quicker to save the information. So highly recommend as an app if you travel at all.
00:16:26
Speaker
We hope these hacks will help you upgrade your mobile phone plan swiftly.
Recap: Tips for Choosing Mobile Phone Plans
00:16:30
Speaker
Determine whether you need Telstra Optus or Vodafone level network coverage, and then work out your data usage by looking at previous bills. Buy your phone outright if the upfront cost is affordable, and remember to visit a comparison site like WhistleApp to compare plan details.
00:16:47
Speaker
If you'd like to join us on our Life Admin journey, please head to our Facebook page, Life Admin Life Hacks, to follow us and share your thoughts on what we're doing. And feel free to post any comments or certainly post suggestions that we might be able to use. We hope to see you there. Thanks for listening. Show notes for this episode are available at lifeadminlifehacks.com. If you're a fan, please subscribe and share the love and tell a friend or review us in your podcasting app.
00:17:19
Speaker
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