Pay as you go go O2... help!

[bea]

Oh i feel like such a dinosaur! Please someone explain what i have done...

Buckle up... we're going for a bumpy ride!

bought dd1 (off to secondary school!) a pay as you go Nokia Asha... thought this was the best deal rather than a contract... although the capped contracts looked good but that's another story!

£40 for phone plus £10 top up

Got home... charged it up for her... read through the blurb.... it said chose a tariff...

I read it as...
choose whatever money you are willing to put in... and this is how much texts and calls will cost you!... so the £20 tariff looked good... 250 mins... 2500 texts etc......

I popped on £20 for her...

meanwhile had been messing around with the phone... sending out testing texts etc... and the little account told me you have £29.60 left etc...

after a while noticed the money was still going down and i thought hang on... what about all these 2500 texts etc... how come the money is counting down...?

re read blurb and found i actually hadn't texted them I want to go on the £20 tariff... ARgh!.. I had just mentally told myself I was going to go for that!!! Stupid! I know...

So texted them and we got a text saying... Well done you have chosen the £20 tariff etc you will be now on the £20 tariff...

This morning dd messing with phone ... rather alarmed! "I've got £8.00 left!"...

I'm assuming the £20 has gone off her phone for the £20 tariff? Is this right!?

But now... i'm more confused... Does this tariff just last for a month?... so for example... by 31st sept will her phone swith off this tariff and go back to normal pay as you go?... or will this last until she has used up all the text/phone allowance?

and then will I have to top it up with whatever tariff i want her to have?

or can i bank £40 onto her phone and when her tariff runs out... just text them to the tariff or will it automatically carry on with the tarriff that she previously had?

Oh dear! and and if you managed to get this far and understood this ramble in ineptitude!

to me for being so rubbish!

I just don't get phones!

You're not a dinosaur, I am an IT consultant and would be confused at that too! You need to take it to a O2 store or phone them - that just sounds strange

Usually it will last a month and you have to top up again before a certain date in the month to get your next months allowance. So say you done it today you have to top up again before end of September to get your next months allowance.

Some of the tariffs take the money off your phone others don't but you need to ring or talk to o2 to find out.. Hope this helps :)

Easiest thing to do is take out the O2 sim card, chuck it in the bin and get a GiffGaff sim card instead (it will work in an O2 phone and is free from www.giffgaff.com). You can transfer the phone number too should you wish. Then you pay £5 a month for loads of free calls & texts or £10 a month if you want Internet too. Voila!

wait until you've used up the month's texts before considering a switch to GiffGaff... Their 10 quid deal is better than the fiver deal, and they do offer free calls and texts to other GiffGaff users, which might help if DD has old / new friends using GiffGaff, but equally, you might not want internet access on her phone, for now... unless it might also be convenient for you to switch to GiffGaff and then you have an easy way to keep in touch, 'free' without it eating any of those paid-for minutes.

As it is an O2 phone, you should be able to use a Tesco SIM in it, and consider one of their capped tariffs at 7.50 (I think was the figure someone else posted).

Yes, see shop.tescomobile.com/sim-only

At Tesco, 7.50 on a month by month (rolling contract) gives 250 minutes and 5000 texts

On a 12 month contract, it adds 500 MB of internet data per month.

So what you initially paid with O2 for unfortunately seems a bit costly compared with 7.50 from Tesco.

thank you all! sounds like i'm not as wise as i thought! re: cheap bargains... yes will run out what i've got on it and then reconsider... tesco sounds good!... can i swap my number over to it?

Should be easy enough to move a number - search for PAC and MAC in geeky_stuff in the last week as another thread covered this...