Check service contracts occasionally

My fault entirely, but maybe you can benefit from my own (repeated) mistake

I really, really, do not like un-necessary marketing and sales emails, notifications, text messages, popups, or other incursions into my digital life. Whenever I set up a new online account, almost the first place I head for is the “settings” or “options” to turn off everything that I can. By and large, this does work and I suffer only a tiny fraction of the guff and rubbish I see pouring into other people’s digital space.

Like most people (I suspect), I also dislike the hassle of accessing online accounts to renew things, review things, and so on. I think all this digital stuff should be there to serve us, to make life easier. It shouldn’t be there to give the marketers endless opportunities to remind us of just how fabulous they are and wouldn’t we like to “engage” with them further?

So, when a 12 or 24 month contract expires, I tend to rely on the fact that, thereafter, the business will then proceed on a “rolling monthly contract”. In other words, things will carry on just as they always did and both parties are able to cancel the arrangement at one month’s notice.

For some reason (or none at all), I’ve recently been noticing adverts for the large amount of data usage available for just £10 per month on mobile SIM contracts. I don’t use much mobile data (I mean, really, watching movies on the bus?) but I do have a “mobile wifi” to give me an extra layer of “internet security” and when my provider recently sent me a letter advising that my contract for it has expired and that they wanted me to renew it at the same price (£14pm for just 4gb data) I actually decided to act and call them about it. I would also ask them about my SIM only phone contract.

Lo and behold, I was offered a better deal covering both phone and mobile wifi for just £14.50 per month compared with £33.37 that I had been paying before. When I rather tartly asked why they hadn’t offered me this deal without my asking, I was very politely informed that it was because I had all the notifications turned off in my account. Hmm. Can’t argue with that.

A day or so later, I remembered that I’d had a very similar experience with my ISP a couple of years ago. I had phoned them in indignation when I had realised that their website was offering the same service as I was getting for nearly 30% less than I was paying. Same reason. Some people never learn, do they?

My SIM only phone contract expired in 2017. At a rough guess, I must have paid about £750 more than I needed to in the six years since then. Think how many units of electricity that could have bought me – even at today’s prices.

By the way, I do realise that my iPhone can provide a “mobile hotspot”, but for some reason I can sometimes connect to either the mobile wifi or the phone from either my own or clients’ devices, but sometimes one or the other won’t connect. A mystery.

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