Tips to avoid unexpected charges on your bill.

[Cleoriff]

Hi All.

I'm looking for a collaboration on this topic.

@Marjo  noticed a thread HERE  and she suggested the Forum might benefit from a guide on ways to limit expenditure which hopefully will avoid unexpected charges on your bill.

I thought I would start with a few and look forward to anyone adding and discussing other ways/methods.

* Spend Caps. (only applicable if you have taken out a contract since Oct 1st) Link Here: Spend Cap

* Other Numbers and Charges. Link Here: Other Numbers And Charges

Going over your monthly allowances for of texts and minutes is the most common reason for a high bill

Making calls, sending texts or using data outside of our Europe Zone

Using your phone to make a purchase, such as buying wifi on train

Making calls to non-geographical or premium rate phone number

Calling a directory enquiry service.

Sending texts to premium rate services, such as voting in a TV competition

(You can contact customer services and ask them to place a Premium Bar on your account. This will stop calls to premium rate numbers, 090, 070 etc).

* Sending SMS which convert to MMS. (Link Here)   Avoid sending MMS

An emoticon/emoji is a smiley face, a thumbs up a heart or any other tiny picture that many people like to add to their SMS messages.

THESE ARE THE BIGGEST SINGLE SOURCE OF ACCIDENTAL MMS SENDING.

Adding an emoticon by itself won’t, in many cases, force the message into MMS format, but, what it will do, is eat up your character count.

A simple smiley face or wink will use 90 characters.

With this in mind it is easy to see how just by adding 3 emoticons actually reduces your character count to only 210 letters (that’s not much!)

You can avoid this by inserting a smiley using keyboard characters rather than hitting the emoticon key and choosing a picture. A smile can be written as : ) or a wink as ; ) 

* Restrict use of Charge to Mobile   Link Here: Charge To Mobile

You can contact customer services and ask them to Bar all Direct to Bill Debits on your account.

(only problem with this, you will need to contact them again to lift the bar, if you wish to purchase anything)

* Don't click on any links on FB etc.

You could find yourself directed to a Payforit scam where you will be charged monthly for services you neither want or need.  More info here: Premium Rate Scams

* Use Wifi instead of Mobile Data (where possible)

* Use Free Apps instead of those you purchase.

That's all I can think of now. If anyone else can add anything, then feel free to do so. This is a 'document in progress'

Thanks also to @MI5 and @adamtemp64 for use of your work re MMS and Premium rate numbers

Look forward to hearing of other ways to limit spending, or avoiding unexpected charges.

[Cleoriff]

@pgn

Whilst I agree with both your suggestions ie RPI and Upgrade pricing, (first bill may be higher) I can't see that we can do anything about that? It happens and can't be avoided.

The title of the thread is 'Tips to avoid unexpected charges on your bill' ...So there is no way to avoid both issues you have mentioned?

[gmarkj]

Not sure if this counts, but if you are trying to send an SMS to multiple recipients it sometimes converts to an MMS.
Instead try sending to one person then copy/paste or forward message.

[Cleoriff]

Good point @gmarkj. That should be included. Thanks.

[Marjo]

Hey @Cleoriff thanks a lot for starting this topic and everyone else who have contributed - really great to see all the different pieces of information in one thread!   

You mentioned that there's starting to be quite a lot of information and links in one list now. A couple of ideas come to mind. Something that might help is to put a very quick summary of the suggestions (kind of like a list/table of contents) at the top of the guide, and then break the guide into clear sections - could even use the horizontal line between them...

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...for example if that helps with separating the different sections. I could help with linking from the contents list to the different sections, in case someone is looking for a specific part of the guide and wants to quickly jump there from the top.

[Cleoriff]

@Marjo

Sounds good. I have sent you a PM to discuss this further. (Thought I'd let you know as the PM notifications are still not working )