Phones are a huge part of our social conscience. You won’t meet anyone from the age of 14 upwards who doesn’t have their own mobile, and you can pay anything from a few pounds per month to a whole quarter of your weekly wage to maintaining the use of your Phone.

There’s all kinds of models out there on the market, with features varying from just making and receiving calls, to using your own face as identification when it comes to being able to pay for your items when shopping –  the last model of iPhone alone combined all kinds of elements like these to try and grant a brand new user experience to the masses.

And all in all, that means your phone can get really expensive, way more than you ever expected it to, and you might even be paying for features you don’t know about, don’t want, and have never used. Phone bills vary widely from model to model, from company to company, so let’s examine whether we can make one work for you.

Pay As You Go or Contract?

There’s all kinds of programs you can look into when it comes to choosing a plan for your new mobile, and you’re going to want to consider them carefully before you settle for what the sales associate tells you is the best, most modern, and hassle free plan on the market. After all, you’re here to save money, and you know just how much money your phone can suck out of your bank each month!

Contract allows you to pay bit by bit each month, with a minimum term to keep you locked into a tariff, and then the ability to change or upgrade by the end of this period. But once you’ve paid for the cost of the handset, and then you’re still paying the same amount in your monthly bill, you’re wasting money you don’t need to! If you decide to go for pay as you go, alternatively, you can instead let yourself pay all the costs upfront (which can be really quite intimidating), and then only pay for the features you need when you need them. And that can save you a lot of money in the long run.

Know What Features You Use the Most

What do you tend to use your phone for? Are you just using it for texting and calling people? Maybe you like having a portable internet device in your pocket, wherever you go? Or maybe you’re just someone who likes the camera feature, and how many pixels that can be jammed into your 4K phone screen? Either way, you need to know which features of your phone you use the most, to make sure you get a plan that’s going to offer your the most in terms of these.

Sites like these can help you to work out things like these, so be sure to input a few figures here and there, with most of the big providers being covered here as well. On the other hand, there’s some apps out there that can tell you how much time you waste on your phone – both could shed some light on how much you should be paying!

What About All That Data?

Data is something we love to use on our phones, seeing as we’re not always near a wifi signal that we can use, and we always have need of sending messages across the internet and staying in touch with the news and our social media. So when it comes to choosing the right plan for your phone, you’re probably immediately on the lookout for what kind of coverage the provider offers you, and whether you can free GBs when you reach your cap for that month.

And this can be quite an insidious program to live by, seeing as we mostly don’t tend to use our 4G allowance up each month. So maybe you should try signing up to a new mobile network, one that allows you to claim back any data you haven’t used for that month, and only pay for the data you consumed. And then your next month phone bill will be even cheaper, seeing as that unused data acts as credit towards the cost!

Your phone bill can work for you, as long as you know the terms to look out for, and how much you tend to use your phone day in and day out.