Add-ons & Extras - Our guide to saving money on your mobile phone contract. Part 2

This is a continuation of our blog series on how you can best save money on your mobile phone. You can read parts one, three and four here: Part 1, Part 3, Part 4

Tip 3: Are you paying for add ons you don’t need?

It really pays to check if you have bolt ons or add ons lurking on your account. A number of people (particularly travellers) have had add ons to cover calls or data abroad added to their accounts. Many of these add-ons automatically renew every month and can add up to a substantial sum.

If you have a contract that you roll over every 12 or 24 months, it pays to review whether these add ons are still needed and whether you could get better value from an alternative tariff.

One of our customers was paying a huge amount for 100MB (MB not GB!) of European data, a sum that made up well over 30% of his total monthly bill at a time when European data in particular was included in most plans as standard.

All the main networks now cover the EU as standard and will add on other countries such as the USA for a relatively low monthly fee.

If most of your travel is in Europe now, worldwide data add-ons probably aren’t worth the money.

Other types of add ons you should review are non-geographic numbers, check the types of number you call as these may now be included in standard tariffs meaning any add-on you have is a bit of a waste of money!

Tip 4: Do your extras actually save you money?

We all know that all the networks are hyper-competitive and are throwing money at consumers to both stop them from leaving or to attract them to their network. As the networks consolidate and form partnerships with other companies, these incentives can become more valuable and diverge away from simply money off your bill.

How can you best take advantage of the offers they make?

Simple, review what you already pay for and what’s important to you.

For example, if you already pay for Netflix, or Spotify, these services can be cancelled without notice. Save yourself the £7.99 for Netflix by going to O2 or the £9.99 for Spotify with Vodafone. If you’re already a BT Sport customer, the EE packages including BT Sport can be very attractive.

Personally, I’ve always loved Spotify (I’m useless at finding great music so their playlists are invaluable). As I was already paying for Spotify when I took out my latest sim-only contract with them I paid £18 per month with £9.99 worth of Spotify included. For me the equivalent of £8.01 for 8GB of data made a lot of sense.

There's a lot more to come. Read part 3 here.