your teens mobile phone use

[happygolucky0]

Hello all I finding it hard to bare the amount of time my Ds is using text on his blackberry at the moment. This seems to be a on going problem from the moment he wakes till 9.30pm the time he is to put it to charge in the kitchen. I was wondering if you would share how you manage it. First things like what they are on eg pay as go or contract. How much use they get for that ect. Then do they use it all day everyday. thank you

[Sparklingbrook]

Hi. DS1 has a Blackberry on contract through T Mobile. It costs £10.50 a month and gets 50 minutes talktime.. We have added £5 a month for unlimited txts.

I have the account online so i can see exactly what is going on and if he is in danger of going over allowance.

[futureunknown]

We pay for DD1 and DD2's contracts. Both have iphones. The contracts include a huge amount of texts so they don't exceed them. The contracts aren't cheap but we do it as part of their birthday presents. They don't get a huge amount at birthday/Christmas as they know their phones cost quite a lot.

[gelatinous]

Mine both have contracts on the understanding that if they exceed them then they pay. However they are both very careful and scarcely ever do. Just occasionally there's a few pence extra when they've inadvertently called a chargeable number and as it happens so seldom (less than once a year) and they are always apologetic I let them off.

I shop around for their contracts and get very cheap ones appropriate to their usage using cashback deals.

Ds's latest was an absolute bargain at £1.20/ month with more texts & minutes per month than he ever uses 300 texts + 100 mins I think and unlimited internet. He's a light user for a teenager - that wouldn't be enough texts for dd, but because he spends a lot of time on the computer he uses that for communicating more than his phone which he tends to use mainly when he's out and about. It's an OK Nokia phone which he's happy enough with but dd would probably turn her nose up at. He had around a month on PAYG between contracts last time while we waited for a good one to come up. When this one finishes it will be over to him to sort out what happens next as he's now 18 and it's time for him to take over.

Dd (16)'s is £8 something per month for 1000 texts and unlimited internet and 300mins with a reasonably decent htc symbian smartphone with WiFi, gps etc. She goes through phases of being pretty much surgically attached to her phone when she uses it seemingly 24/7 and then phases when it's not used much at all. She wants an iPhone next though, and I've never seen them with such good deals.

I think the unlimited internet deals are drawing to a close now which is a shame as they both use that bit quite a lot. Neither of them use many minutes at all - 50 or less a month easily. Ds also used his abroad at xmas and didn't get billed extra (even though they said he would be).

[DiscoDaisy]

My DD who is 16 bought her own phone. It is a Blackberry lookalike. She has a contract that is in my OH's name and comes out of our account.
It's £10 a month for unlimited texts and 300 minutes. The Internet is blocked on her phone thanks to a very nice man at Vodafone.
She's on it a lot but most of her friends from school live 10 miles or more away from us!

[happygolucky0]

thanks so much everyone for the replies.

Gelatinous if you dont mind me asking where did you get the deals for £1.20 from that is a great price? Well done!

[gelatinous]

I've always used e2save happygolucky, but there are other sites too. It's vastly easier if you have a dc who doesn't mind too much what model of phone they have and the more readily they will accept an older model the better too. The best deals are always for reconditioned phones and you have to look out for them (they have the same warranty as new ones, but come in an opened box and sometimes have non-essential bits like memory cards missing). They've always been fine for us though.

Probably obvious, but just in case it's not, with the cashback deals you pay quite a lot more per month (~£18 for dd and £20 for ds iirc) and then have to remember to claim back the difference at the right time, usually at 3 monthly intervals. Obviously if you forget to do this it works out more expensive. So far I've managed not to forget, but statistically I expect a lot of people do.

[happygolucky0]

oh my gosh just checked out esave some of those deals are amazing. Thank you!

[DiscoDaisy]

My DD's contract didn't include a phone. We just bought that seperately as all the contracts that included phones were for 18 month or longer and we didn't want to be tied in for that long.
Hers is for 12 months and after that it is a rolling contract that only requires 1 months notice when we want to change.

[BackforGood]

Wow! Thanks gelatinous, that sort of a deal woud suit me down to the ground . I don't use mine a lot, and care not a jot what it looks like.

[angelarobinson]

I use Vodafone 'FREEBIES' on PAYG phones. A £10 top up and you can get 100 minutes, 300 texts and 50MB web access which i think is more than enough talk/text time for my DD. They also have other deals on there. I've tried to teach my DD to manage her credit but it's proving difficult because she always says she has no credit to call me and ends up borrowing her friend's phone in an emergency. I've heard the '68700' service a bit like the 0800 reverse service for mobiles, which I'm going to subscribe my DD to she'll always have access to call me even when she has no credit.

[3nationsfamily]

We bought my DD her phone for her 12th birthday last year and started with a PAYG until we sussed out what she was actually going to use. It turned out she used hardly any call minutes but loads of texts (we disabled internet except for WiFi at home). So she is now on a Vodafone SIM only contract for £10.50 per month which gives "unlimited " texts (3000) and 300 minutes plus 50MB. I was astounded to see that on average she uses 2500 txts per month!!! But I have to say since she got Facebook on her 13th birthday her txt usage has gone down to about 1500 per month as obviously there is now a switch of some of the communication lines to FB.