How do I persuade my mum ...

mountainofdebt

telephone bills could be alot cheaper ?????

Basically she has the free weekend and evening telephone call package with BT which I think is costing her £16.50 per month.

Now (slightly going off topic!) she won't switch from British Gas becasue she's heard of all sorts of problems when people switch energy suppliers so when British Gas started offering free weekend & evening calls I suggested to her that she might like to switch to this - well she might as well be paying the extra for soemthing!

Trouble is she won't believe that you get soemthing for nothing and reckons that it will cost more to use the phone at other times (not that she does much of this).

Is there some sort of table I can show here to prove the costs will be lower?

Am going to try and persuade her to sign up to 18866 as well but I don't rate my chances !

gravitytolls

I use 18866 and my calls, including those to mobile, were less than £2.50; that'd be enough to persuade me. :j

bbb_uk

British Gas (or OneTel in reality) are doing the same package your mother is on but for free for the next 12months so a call to BG or OneTel (not sure who you would contact) and threaten to leave may get you on it for nothing (for 12months) anyhow. That's should be easy to sell to your mother and just explain that her calls on OneTel/BG (or most other companies) are about 2.7p per minute daytime but with Call18866 she can have daytime calls at 2p per call (0p per minute) no matter how long she is on the phone for.

An example of daytime costs might come in handy like a 5min call would be 13.5p on OneTel/BG but only 2p on Call18866 and this is only for a quick 5min call.

That should convince your mother - the main problem could be getting OneTel/BG to switch her to the same plan but free for 12months. Some people (according to some MSE posts) have been able to get OneTel/BG to switch them over to the free tariff because they threatened to leave.

Remember that OneTel's offer of free evening/weekend calls ends the end of this month. OneTel could extend the offer but cant really be sure as TalkTalk have stopped doing their same offer so OneTel may decide to end it.

If you do go for this method, I'd recommend the Orchid Dialler to save your mother having to remember to dial 18866 before each call (daytime or not).

If your mother makes very few calls and thats why your thinking of just Call18866 without OneTel then maybe look at one of her bills and work out how much on Call18866 it would have cost compared to what it is now on OneTel/BG. Exclude the line rental but remember to include the additional monthly fee she pays for the free evening/weekend package.

UPDATE: I misread the post and thought your mother was already on the free evening/weekend but was paying for it so most part of this post is useless. Read April's post below which makes more sense. Sorry. lol

April2

mountainofdebt wrote:

telephone bills could be alot cheaper ?????

Basically she has the free weekend and evening telephone call package with BT which I think is costing her £16.50 per month.

Now (slightly going off topic!) she won't switch from British Gas becasue she's heard of all sorts of problems when people switch energy suppliers so when British Gas started offering free weekend & evening calls I suggested to her that she might like to switch to this - well she might as well be paying the extra for soemthing!

Trouble is she won't believe that you get soemthing for nothing and reckons that it will cost more to use the phone at other times (not that she does much of this).

Is there some sort of table I can show here to prove the costs will be lower?

Am going to try and persuade her to sign up to 18866 as well but I don't rate my chances !

The British Gas 'free evening and weekend calls to UK 01 & 02 numbers' offer is available to customers via OneTel (also owned by Centrica). It is genuine. You do get free evening and weekend calls to UK 01 & 02 numbers.

Then, she could tell BT to downgrade her line to BT Together Option 1 and pay them only for line rental - £10.50/month if she pays by Direct Debit (£11.50/month if she doesn't). She's then saved £6/month instantly.

She could then just continue to make weekday daytime calls on BT at 3p/minute OR use 18866 to reduce the cost of those calls to 2p each (not 2p/minute, 2p in total for a call of any length).

If she won't listen though ................

aerostar

Since using 18866 and 1899 my last BT bill NOT including line rental charges was under 40p - my calls through the above numbers came to less than £5 that is for more than a 3 month period. My BT call costs previously were high to say the least.

Edinburghlass_2

Quite a few of MSE users would tell you to let her speak to me and I'll soon persuade her

Glad

Edinburghlass wrote:

Quite a few of MSE users would tell you to let her speak to me and I'll soon persuade her

just make sure she has her Scottish/English dictionary and 2 hrs to hand,
some people can take 2 hrs to explain something that could be said in 10 mins

April2

Glad wrote:

just make sure she has her Scottish/English dictionary and 2 hrs to hand,
some people can take 2 hrs to explain something that could be said in 10 mins

Miaow ..........

stellagypsy

You could try doing what I did - I put my mum's number on my 1899 bill (she is with NTL) and told her to give it a try. She was very apprehensive, thought NTL would ring her up and tell her off for not making calls with them (where do they get these ideas from???????). Reluctantly she tried it. Now she loves it, costs her virtually nothing for calls. She still won't go the whole hog and have Onetel for evening and weekend calls but I'm working on it. Her bloke calls his daughter in Canada from this line also, espeicially good value when it was "free".

She gave me a fiver for calls in January and still hasn't used it up yet.

gavinp

I had exactly the same problem so I bought my parents an Orchid dialler as a "present".

I set it up on my account for two weeks then printed out the bill and showed it to them - their calls came to 97p (including a couple of mobile calls).

They signed up for their own account without any further prompting...

Thanks

Gavin

andy88_2

It's amazing how much inertia people can have against changing something. I just lent my foreign mobile to a friend for a brief trip abroad. When the car broke down (so he's going to make more calls than expected) I had to tell him to switch that one on to save money. I lent another phone so his wife could ring him up cheaper; he forgot to give her the charger!

Another friend just said he spent about £500 on our trip to Lithuania last year. I could have cut it to about £60 with a local SIM and callback service if I'd known in advance he'd talk that much (another disadvantage of being away from a new girlfriend)

I've told about 20 people about 18866 or 1899. The instant reaction is suspicion - what's the catch?

I took about six months to persuade someone to stop spending £100 a month on payg internet dial-up for their business. I'm still trying to save them £100s a year on mobiles. One contract costs about £17 a month and gets used for about 2 minutes - £10 if it was payg would last a year.

Yeah, how do you persuade people to save money? We can't set Edinburghlass and Glad on to all of them.

I think Stella and Gavin have the right ideas. Just do it. Maybe I'll install an Orchid box at work - "oooh, what if it breaks down ...?" It won't.