Phone bill is ridiculously high - help needed in getting it down a bit (lot)

[Brownflowers]

I’ll try to explain everything in my post in the hope someone might be able to help.

For a not inconsiderable length of time, I had a number of phone connections,all with the same provider (O2.) I obviously had to pay for the line rental, which totalled around £100 a month at the peak time. In addition to this, I had phone bills of usually over £100 a month. As you can imagine, it was costing a lot.

I have now paid off all of the connections apart from my current phone, an iPad (this expires in July) and an Apple Watch. So my line rentals are now down to a much more manageable £45 a month which will go down again to £30 a month in July.

I thought, probably naively, that my phone bills would come down too but they haven’t. I rang O2 last week to try to get to the bottom of it and I’m none the wiser. It was honestly the most unhelpful phone call I’ve ever had and was also nearly two hours of my life I’ll never get back!

I could really use some help. I do use my phone but I wouldn’t say enormously excessively - I’m not making calls abroad or anything - and I don’t think it’s data use, as I don’t use my phone enormously out of the house. I don’t watch videos or films using data either.

Any advice?

OK, so your plan is to go into a shop. Not a bad plan, with one caveat. When they have cancelled your plans (the ones you don't want) MAKE SURE YOU GET THIS CONFIRMED IN WRITING. They can email you if they want, but check your emails before leaving the shop.

Then if the cancellation mysteriously doesn't happen, you have proof.....

I'd record the call as well, they can be an utter nightmare and deny everything.

I bloody hate dealing with phone companies.

Are you sure that you’ve come to the end of your contracted tariff?

It won’t necessarily be the same as your device plan, especially if you’ve agreed to extend it at any point (which can happen quite sneakily when they call you to offer a better rate).

So you can have for each phone eg a device payment (now finished) and a separate tariff payment which you might be contracted into for another 12 months.

Good idea. Download Voice Recorder on your phone (Android) if you don't already have it. Once you set if recording, you can navigate to another page and/or put phone on standby. Writing is still best tho as it avoids any possible 'but you're not supposed to record me....GDPR' whinges from staff.