How to Find Cheap Phone Sets

One of the items our parents never spent a single dime on, is cell phone. The cost of carrying a phone is manifold. Interestingly cost varies between providers and countries you use them in. After starting to use cell phones I spent probably upwards of $5,000 already.

it’s important to find every possible ways to cheapest price for phones or least costly phone plans that can suit your need. At the end do eliminate every possible add-ins that you will never use. Try to find possible deals, even check out if cell phone carriers provide special discount to employees of your organization.

(See Also – Phone apps that may save you money)

If you work for a big company there’s high chance that there is a specially negotiated offer price for the employees. Previously I looked in to overall strategy for reducing phone bills. In this post I’ll concentrate on ways to reduce the cost of handset only.

Ways to reduce phone set cost

Buy refurbished cell phones
Buying refurbished gives you healthy price concession and in most of the cases refurbished phone work just as great as the brand new out of the assembly line phone. If you understand how companies refurbish, buying refurbished item may not seem that bad actually. We have our wireless router which is refurbished. That Linksys router costs more than $100 to buy a brand new model. I got it from eBay for as low as $45. It has been about a year and we didn’t have any problem with our router so far.

During manufacturing process tiny glitches appear on few of the models, this may be due to malfunctioning of the machine or temporary negligence of the assembly line worker. Often the defects are very very minor can be fixed easily. Go for a refurbished model, if the same warranty applies as on the brand new model.

Eliminate features you don’t need
Latest phone features are sold at a premium. Cheaper models don’t include the very latest technology, but they still include great features. If you can eliminate features you probably won’t use, like text messaging, a music player, downloading ring tones, etc, you’ll get a cheap phone satisfying your every need.

Buy a phone with a plan
Phone manufacturers offer deep discounts on even the latest cell phones if you sign up with a plan. Typically in US the duration is 2 years. Signing on the contract line often brings the price down. Price of newest iPhone 5s comes around $500 without contract but with 2 years contract with At&T or Verizon let you take one home for $199 (plus fees and taxes).

Choose an older model
Phone manufacturers come up with new models every year, the newest models, and each year, previous year’s price for the mobile phone sets drop dramatically. You can get cheaper phone sets by looking for older models. You still get the newer version but not with the premium price. I never bought my iPhone models as soon as they came on market. I still have iPhone 5 since last 5 months. Although we have iPhone 5s and 5c on the market. And SMB still sues iPhone 3.

Buy a phone without a plan

Often buying phone without contract helps. With contract you end up paying for fixed number of minutes every month. Where as with pay as you go phone (in some countries this is known as “prepaid” plans) you buy fixed number of minutes based on your anticipated need. You don’t need to pay termination fee to change your carrier.

When you add up 24 months of limited expenses, you eventually pay less for the overall cost of having a phone service.