Are you fed up with sky-high mobile bills? Is your contract driving you up the wall? If so, don’t panic as there are plenty of solutions to ensure you're no longer throwing away your hard-earned cash.

You could save £100s in the process by following the correct action plan. The biggest savings can often come from moving to a completely new deal with a new provider, yet switching networks can be a hassle so it’s wise to first see if you can save without jumping ship.

Want to stick with your current network?

If you’ve got a contract mobile phone, when approaching the end of your contract don’t be afraid to ask for a much better deal; after all sticking with the same network can save you a fortune. Before you start, use a comparison site (see below) to find out how good a package you should be asking for.

If it says it can't give you a better deal, tell it you’d like to go through to its disconnections department. That’s because internally these are often known as ‘customer retentions’ and the operators there have much greater discretion to give a better deal to prevent you leaving. Often the savings from doing this can be massive.

For full step-by-step instructions read Martin’s full Mobile Phone Haggling guide.

Find the best possible deal from any network?

First decide whether you’re better off on a contract or a pay-as-you-go deal; as a general rule, if you use less than 150 minutes of calls and 100 texts a month, Pay-As-You-Go will be cheaper. Yet for higher usage than that, a contract deal is usually cheapest, though you'll usually be credit scored to get this. There are two steps to finding the best deal.

STEP 1. Find the right tariff

The tariff is the network's settings for your phone, which dictates the cost of calls, texts and if it’s a contract deal how many free minutes. This is the crucial start point. The easiest way to find your cheapest tariff is to use a web comparison service like One Compare, Mobile Phone Checker or Moneysupermarket, but ensure you just search for the cheapest tariff, excluding any cashback discounts (details why below).

For complete and explanded details read Martin’s Full Cheapest Mobiles guide. 

STEP 2 FOR CONTRACT DEALS.  Now search for cashback.

Now you know what the cheapest tariff is, those looking for contracts can see if any cashback deals are available. Sadly cashback deals are incredibly unreliable, and many people either fail to get the cashback or recently have seen their cashback companies go bust.

Yet as you’ve found the cheapest tariff possible anyway, consider a cashback deal as an added extra. If it works, great; if it doesn’t you’re still on the cheapest deal for you. Even if the cashback company goes bust, as your tariff is through the ‘network’ your overall deal won’t end.

For details on what to do if your cashback company has gone bust read the Cashback Insolvency Guide.

STEP 2 FOR PAYG DEALS: Now search for the cheapest handset deal.

Often people are tempted by cheap handset deals and simply go for those. Yet the cost of calls over a year is likely to be many times higher than the handset cost. That’s why it's so important to pick the tariff first and then find the right handset on that particular tariff.

For details, reviews of comparison services and the best deals, read Martin’s Full Cheapest Mobiles guide.

THE STUDIO CHALLENGE

We invited three volunteers onto the programme who are paying too much for their mobiles and were all nearing the end of their contracts. They all haggled with their network and between them will slash their annual bills by a whopping £880.  The winning haggle saved £370 in just ten minutes.

Related Link: You can also easily get free texts. Full details are included in Martin’s Free Texts article.