Discount topup vouchers for mobile phones
Most of us these days have a mobile phone and a lot of us use the pay as you go method rather than having a contract, which means that we buy our credit in the form of top up vouchers. Did you know that sometimes you can save money when you do this though?! It’s not always possible, but depending on your circumstances, and where you buy the credit from, you can sometimes make substantial savings, and failing that, you can at least get some points back towards a future purchase.
If you by your top up credit in boots for example, you will earn points at 4 points to the £1 (1 point = 1p) so a £10 top up will earn you 40 points (or 40p) to spend in the store at a later date. If you topped up in Sainsburys for the same amount, you’d get 20 points back on the nectar system, which is worth 10p off a future spend. The same applies to other stores with points cards such as Tesco and WHSmiths for example. Though with Tesco it’s worth looking out for promotions as they sometimes do things like triple points when you top up in a specific week or with a specific amount.
If you use a Virgin* mobile phone & you are a student then your best place to buy top ups is in the Zavvi shops where all students can get a 10% discount card which can be used on all purchases in store including mobile phone top ups meaning that a £10 top up voucher would only cost you £9 an incredible saving of £1.
Another way to save money is to look on places like ebay where sometimes people sell top up credit. They do this because sometimes when you buy a new phone it will come with a free credit for a particular network, and if you don’t use that network then the credit won’t be any good to you. This means that for those who do use it, if they’re lucky then they will be able to buy it for less than it’s value. Obviously the price you pay there will vary, but for example a quick look on there just now found me a £20 vodaphone top up on buy it now for £18 and free delivery because they will e-mail you the credit code when you’ve paid. So you’d make a saving of £2 on this which is 10%. There was also a t-mobile sim card with £20 credit going for £14.99 plus £1 postage, and a tesco sim card with £10 of credit going for £6.99 plus 87p postage (these were also on buy it now).
So, before you top your phone up next time, think about which of these methods is going to save you the most money!
*A side note with Virgin phones, is that for every £100 of credit you put on your phone, they credit you with £10 towards buying a new phone from them if you’ve registered your phone with them so it’s well worth doing this.
