Tame your phone bill to beat inflation

By JOHN KARIUKI

One grey area in our personal finances is that we rarely face our mobile phone bills head on! We continue making calls to talk trivial things that cannot justify the cost of the airtime in these hard times. But while your friends and relatives expect you to keep in touch by calling them, you can save a lot of money by re-examining your calling habits.

Personal finance advisers say that the problem with phone costs is that people don’t see the actual shillings and cents when they top up virtually. This habit often leads to extravagance. To tame this habit, it is prudent to credit your phone with vouchers. This way, you can keep track of your spending.

 It is not a secret that many people spend at least Sh100 daily on credit. But if one can marshal enough courage to take an audit of his or her calling behaviour, chances are that we would be surprised to realise that Sh100 per day comes to around Sh36,000 per year on phone credit alone! And most of what we talk is vanity that doesn’t add to our income generating capacity. But if you can control your calling culture by budgeting, say, airtime worth Sh20 per day, this would translate to Sh600 per month. This figure is manageable.

As the effects of the recently introduced VAT law continue to snowball across many spheres, it is advisable to make calls only when it is absolutely necessary and be brief. Any conversation beyond a minute is usually subsidiary to the core business that necessitated the call. A common money saving trick is to flash people who have more interest than you in making contact so that they invest in the call.

 Writing text messages considerably reduces one’s mobile phone bill. Local mobile phone operators charge anything from 50 cents to Sh2 per SMS with an average of Sh1 for in-network SMSs. For only Sh10, you can reach out to ten people daily whereas making a call to each for only one minute may cost up to Sh40. It costs even less to communicate by email to the same number of people as many phones nowadays have internet connectivity.

 Another drain in people’s mobile phone usage involves the money transfer service. We don’t seem to respect this service as we do to our regular bank accounts. Yet both involve your hard earned cash!

 Best defense

 Many Kenyans are fast adopting a culture of paying for many superfluous goods and services, like drinks in pubs using the mobile money service. By not physically counting the coins and bank notes, people tend to be careless with their money in such virtual accounts.

Every time you deposit money in your bank account and transfer it into your mobile phone account, you make the money more accessible to many non priority expenses. Within days, you are likely to have drained such an account for purposes that you may not account for. The best defense then is to make your regular bank account not accessible through your phone by not signing up for this service!

Track all the transactions that you effect via mobile phone money transfer by writing them down. If you have a list staring at you, chances are that you will strike off some items and only transfer money to the most essential needs; like power and water bills. A fool proof way of safeguarding your virtual money accounts is by leaving the phone sim cards of these money transfer accounts at home, just like a bank card and using a different line for normal calls.

Downloading ring tones, phone “call waiting music,” games and streaming videos is not only unnecessary, but extremely costly especially now. A fee of Sh20 for a ring tone may not seem much until one adds about 50 of these which some phones with memory cards can accommodate. Subscription to the phone “call waiting music” costs Sh20 per month. And some people often change these songs weekly to keep up with the trendy tunes, adding to the cost of using their mobile phones! Lastly, calls within the same network always save money! If majority of your friends and family members are on one network, it is economical for you to consider joining them.