Best way to pay for a mobile phone - contract or SIM only

[Muchtoomuchtodo]

Me and 2 Ds all have pay monthly contracts with EE. I pay just over £80 a month for all 3 of us.

It works well, we can move date between us, I can manage it all from one app and EE sort any problems with the phones. The coverage is good at home and at school too.

Ds2 is due an upgrade but the costs seem to have shot up - for a similar contract with a newer phone we’re looking at £400 upfront charges.

Is it better to buy a phone ourselves then just have a SIM only deal? How does everyone else do it?

100% sim only, cheaper phones that still do a great job, between £100-£150 buys a fantastic phone and 100gb a month for £20

Handsets on contract mean you can easily pay £720 for the same handset over three years. Madness!!

Does she now own the handset?
If so could she just get a new sim only contract for the phone?
EE will sort it so she keeps her number

Just because he's due an upgrade, doesn't mean he needs an upgrade. He could keep the same phone and move over to sim only payments.

I kept my last phone for 2 years past the end of its contract on a sim only deal. I got more data for less money than with my provider and when I looked at new contracts the deals for data were rubbish.

When the phone finally got too obsolete to be useful, I bought a Pixel 4A from Amazon and just kept my sim only deal going. It wasn't an enormously expensive phone so I can see why a contract would be attractive if you're looking at a £1k plus model, but it was still way more phone for my money than I'd have got on a contract for a similar cost.

Ds1 gets secondhand phones off eBay when he wants to trade up a bit.

Thanks. For some reason he’s got his heart set on an iPhone 11pro which have been discontinued and are really expensive.
I might see if he’ll swap to SIM only with his current phone and save the difference to out towards a better phone when his current one is really not up the the job.
The battery is starting to run down quickly but it might buy us a bit of time at least!!

I got battery replaced in my iPhone recently in apple store. Sorted the problem and yes, I've kept the phone now for couple years beyond end of contract. I'm on a SIM only deal.
"Due an upgrade" doesn't mean you need to if phone is still perfectly fine

What are you getting for your £80 a month?

Without knowing what that includes no one can really make any suggestions on whether something else would be better.

It's usually far cheaper to buy the phone outright, and get a SIM only for your data (and review what data you're paying for regularly, because many people either pay for too much, and don't use it all, or pay for too little, and pay extra charges at a higher rate). Buying outright being cheaper is especially true if you keep the phone more than two years.

However, sometimes there are oddities where it's cheaper the other way around. There was one such example in the MSE newsletter last week, it was a different types of iphone 11, so I don't know what difference that makes, but MSE has a good page that explains how to get each type of phone for the best price.

www.moneysavingexpert.com/cheap-mobile-finder/contracts/apple/

They also suggest ways of spreading the cost of the phone if you buy it outright, eg on a 0% purchase credit card.

If it’s only his battery and he has an iPhone can you replace the battery with Apple I think I it’s £60/£80? Might get a good year out of
It