Thanks for this post, i was genuinely thinking it was just me who could see the crystal clear logic of my argument. Maybe I'm more in tune with the dangers of the 'it's only £30/mth' thinking as i have in the past worked as a debt counsellor and you would not believe the size of the mobile contracts many of the ones in the most debt crisis were committed to. Getting into debt for an 'entertainment' product is imo silly and can be the start of a slippery slope. It's not like there aren't mobiles that are eminently affordable, some on here seem to think you can't possibly be happy with any mobile costing less than half a grand. Madness,

I know this is off topic, but yeah I've been broke after I had a business go wrong and its not a great place to be.

Anyway I don't think buying a phone on a contract is a terrible terrible thing but you can't say you can afford 30/month if you don't have access to £500 as you should be saving all your spare dough to build an emergency fund. I've been told that you should aim for at least 3 months take home as an emergency fund but I would say aim for 6-12 months if possible.

Excluding mortgage/rent living totally debt free is a happy place to be

So if they can afford £30 month, it will take them 17 months to save up for a £500 phone. Are you saying they shouldn't have access to the option of getting the phone on a contract? Maybe you would like a section in the mobile phone shop for poor people?

Even better, lets not have £12 call/data packages and you just pay for what you use, after all, if you can afford £12.......

there is. it's called PAYG.

Did you forget about poor suckers?

Sadly your point of view is only too common. £500 or £30/month for a phone is a luxury by any standards. Great if you can afford it but for someone without £500 in the world to commit to a £30/month phone contract is totally irresponsible. If that includes you no amount of spurious arguments will change the fact.

You are not thinking about it correctly though. if someone can afford £30 a month for a phone contract then they will have more spare money per month to save towards it to it won't take a 17 months at all.

Although I agree with some of the other posters here you are better off not buying things on credit at all unless it's a house and maybe a car.

Your arguments are getting sillier TBH. Poor people? Do you mean the ones who can't afford £500 up front so choose to buy it on credit with lots of strings attached? Isn't that what you are currently doing? And you seem to be running away with the idea that myself and others on here who can see the inherent dangers in what you are promoting are in some way stating these people shouldn't be able to do it. Not true, It's free choice so no desire to get the practice banned but I am just trying to bring a bit of responsible thinking into getting into debt for a (relatively speaking) trivial entertainment product. It's not really rocket science.

There is no crystal clear logic to your argument.
It is, by your own admission, just your opinion.

There are great deals to be had both by buying a handset outright and getting a separate service and by signing into a fixed-term tariff.
Your presumption that a SIM-free/SIM-only combination is automatically better is no less foolish than you insist signing into a 24-month contracts is.


As for the idea that the only items one should take out credit for are a house and a car, I find that that extremely curious.
If it's such a bad idea to sign into a contract to get a particular phone, bearing in mind that that includes a service as part of the cost, how can people then turn around and suggest that taking out credit for a car, an item that will depreciate markedly over the term of the credit agreement, is a good idea?

A car is slightly different from a phone though due to their cost - even most old cars that can just about scrape an MOT cost more that most even high end smartphones.

And if you want the guarantee of it working with a full warranty extra then it will cost even more.

A car is about freedom and being able to go where you want, being able to get to work and there is no real cheap way of owning a car.

A smartphone though can be bought brand new for about £60 that will do most things.

Crikey, I've made it clear enough that what i post is MY OPINION so of course it is MY OPINION that my thinking on this involves crystal clear logic. And, no, IN MY OPINION you have it wrong with regards to a 24 month commitment sometimes being better than buying the phone outright due to the 24 month commitment and the inherent problems that can cause later on (no-one can see see into the future, not even Derren Brown ). The fact is IN MY OPINION if you can't afford to buy a trvial entertainment product outright you really can't afford it. I do find the reluctance to accept this, IN MY OPINION, simple concept quite scary.

PS The car analogy is not a great one TBH. A car can get you to work, allow you to get from A to B quicker than the bus etc etc. Plus a car usually costs way more than even a high end phone so in many cases there will be a need to have a loan to pay for it. Being unable to wholly fund the purchase of for instance a £10,000 car is very very different to being unable to fund the purchase of a £500 phone (plus it's not like you can pay a 25% cash down payment on the phone with the network like you can with a car.)

Yes, if you can afford £30/month for a phone contract, the chances are with some effort you could probably live cheap and save £100/month, then in 3 months you've got the money to buy a nexus 4 up front. The giffgaff type of deals offer they best of both worlds in that you get practically unlimited calls/texts/internet etc for the 12/month with no contract, BUT and here is the thing, you can at any time not pay that and just go standard pay as you go and eek out £20 over 3-4 months if you didn't make many calls.

It's best to avoid buying a car on credit if possible, but it's understandable as for most a car isn't a luxury as you need it to get to work and so on.

You can get a basic phone for £60 which will do until you can afford a top end smart phone.

Regardless, the argument that you shouldn't take something out on credit in case your circumstances change would apply equally, if not more-so, to credit agreement for a car given the magnitude of the costs involved.

If £30 a month is such a massive risk, so is a loan for a car.




That was before you started saying that people who disagree with you couldn't see the 'crystal clear logic' of your argument.


It's not an analogy, it's a simple question given your drastically different views on two similar situations.

If a service agreement of less than £1000 is such a terrible risk in case your circumstances change, then finance on a car must be a distinctly greater risk, given that you would be all but guaranteed to find yourself trapped in a negative equity situation.




Is that the case though?
How many people could use public transport but elect not to? How many people have a car only to drive a short distance to a train station so they can commute?

If we're at the point of arguing that £30/month is a luxury, then a large number of cars would also need to be classed as such as their owners could do without them.

It's crystal clear to anyone with a modicum of financial common sense that if you don't have the means to access £500 then you can't afford 30/month on a non-essential luxury as this £30 should be being saved so you have some sort of savings.

I do wish people were taught the basics of personal finances at school.

No, and I'm not sure how you came to that conclusion. My finances are not up for is discussion, but spending money on a phone has no effect on me. However, maybe where we differ is that I would not want to dictate what others can afford to spend or whether they should be allowed to spend their money on an 'entertainment' item.

I'm not sure why you would not want them to have that choice.

What a silly statement.

Rubbish.

Your assumption that if someone couldn't afford £500 outright then they can't afford £30 a month is absolutely laughable.

For the record, IN MY OPINION your logic is crystal clear to me

Funny how when useful bits of information emerge how quickly a real topic gets moved onto 'desirability'', 'status' and such like.

The same boring ever decreasing circles again.
I do wonder if Apple, as design specialists and thus said to be 'makers of pretty things' are actually any good at all when it comes to actual software.

Apple used to be as much about software as hardware, sometimes even more so.

But that was in the days of Steve Jobs. Things are slightly different these days.

It seems to me that the only person dragging this into an Anti Apple discussion yet again is yourself. The debate was simply one of whether it's right to potentially put oneself into debt to fund a mobile phone.

As regards your second point, I suggest you ask the developer community whether Apple are any good at software. IOS is generally still the preferred platform for developing apps and some of the under the hood changes in IOS 7 will probably keep the developers on side.

Have to agree with you.

Completely idiotic.

It all depends what you mean by 'can't afford' I guess. IN MY OPINION if you really haven't got £500 savings to buy a high end smartphone then you really can't 'afford' it, I just can't see how anyone could argue convincingly against this. What happens if you lose your job, for instance, after signing up for £30/mth for 2 years? It would be OK if you had an emergency fund but we've already established the punter hasn't even got £500 spare so what happens then?

I am genuinely staggered at the blase attitude to debt on here.

PS IN MY OPINION.

It's unbelievable to me that you would consider spending 30/month in some kind of credit agreement on a luxury product if you haven't even got a paltry £500 to your name.

It just shows lack of any financial responsibility and stupidity. No wonder all these payday loans companies that charge silly apr's are doing so well.