My phone is dying because I am absolutely shit at taking care of it. I bring it everywhere with me and I drop it basically all the time.
Anyway, the current iPhone XR 64GB is $1299 and that is moneyyyyy.
But, my contract with Singtel is almost up and I wanted to see what was more worth. These are the two plans that I thought would fit me best.
Right now, I pay about $68/month (sim-only plan) for 30GB of data + Spotify + 350mins talk time + 500sms. In terms of usage, every month I use only about 30mins of calls and 15GB of data.
In other words, super not worth. Calculating what would be worth for me was super hard – lets get down to bidniss.
The money of it all:
These were the two plans that I was looking at:
Like at first glance, I thought that the XO78 plan was obviously more worth – I mean, the phone is already like $350 less – and I definitely use more than 5GB a month.
But then, who actually uses 40GB of data a month?!
Even when I was streaming Netflix on my phone on the MRT to and from work, while running on the treadmill, and browsing Reddit (dem GIFs eat data), the most I ever hit was like 23GB.
K, so lets do the math:
(full disclosure – actually social science student so me no math too good so lmk if I’ve fucked up anywhere)
| XO 48 | XO 78 | |
| Cost per month (Plan) | 48 | 78 |
| Cost of iPhone XR | 498 | 148 |
| Total Cost Plan (24 Months) + Phone | 1650 | 2020 |
| Total Price Difference | –370 | +370 |
| Actual cost per month | 68 | 84 |
| Price difference per month | -16 | +16 |
| Cost per GB | 6.8 | 2.1 |
| Price difference per GB | +4.7 | -4.7 |
So actually right, when you’ve math-ed it out, the $370 price difference doesn’t look too bad, but the per month price difference starts too look abit shit (cause even though it’s actually on $16, it looks closer to $20 cause my brain just kannut)
When all this was going down, Singtel was offering $100 for re-contract and an additional $100 for phone upgrades. That’s a sweet sweet $200 off – so now we gotta math this again, because it is important to account for all factors.
So now we have to math again:
| XO 48 | XO 78 | |
| Cost per month (Plan) | 48 | 78 |
| Cost of iPhone XR | 298 | 0 |
| Total Cost Plan (24 Months) + Phone | 1450 | 1872 |
| Total Price Difference | –422 | +422 |
| Actual cost per month | 60 | 78 |
| Price difference per month | -18 | +18 |
| Cost per GB | 6.0 | 1.95 |
| Price difference per GB | +4.7 | -4.05 |
Ok, now this changes things aliddlebit because the discounts only apply to the phone – sneaky right?
The price per month for XO 48 goes down $8/mth but the price for the XO 78 drops only $6/month in real costs – which honestly isn’t too bad – but honestly this is us RN trying to get the best deal possible:
Now when I apply this to my own usage – say generously, lets give it about 20GB a month, that’s still 20GB that I’m not using. AND not counting that the only time I’ve ever hit more than 100min was there was sum real tea goin on.
I mean, what would I do with 300mins of talk time – lawd what would I do with 300 SMSes?
But again, having to cut down on data use really, really sucks.
But, if you think about it, the phone itself is $1299, and I’m actually paying $1450 for the plan – that means that if I count it as paying off the phone, I’m only paying $151 for data, calls, and all that jazz.
And really, that seems kinda ok to me 🙂
btw for much better math – moneysense
