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O2 Refresh the ins and outs
O2 Refresh is a neat idea and it’s been around for a while, but if you’re on another network or have been with O2 since before it rolled out its Refresh initiative it might have passed you by. So what is it?
Essentially it splits your monthly bill into two parts, one part of the monthly charge (known as the Phone Plan or Device Plan) goes towards paying off your phone, while the other part (known as the Airtime Plan) goes towards your data, texts, and minutes.
Most networks combine the two into one lump sum, which means that if you want to upgrade early you have to pay off the balance of both parts of the bill, and equally if your contract comes to an end and you don’t upgrade immediately you’ll keep paying the same amount, even though you’ve already paid off your phone.
By splitting the bill up, O2 Refresh allows you to only pay off the remaining cost of the phone if you want to upgrade early, and if you don’t want to upgrade early then - after 24 months when the phone is fully paid off - if you don’t want a new phone you stop paying that part and only pay for your minutes, texts and data, dramatically reducing the cost of the contract.
As an example, let’s say you had a £40 per month 24-month plan on O2 Refresh, where £20 was going towards paying the phone off and the other £20 towards your allowances. After 24 months if you chose not to upgrade you’d only have to pay £20 per month, as you wouldn’t be paying for your phone anymore.
Or if after 12 months you wanted to upgrade early you’d only have to pay off the remaining 12 months of £20 phone payments, rather than paying twelve times £40. So in this example that’s half what you’d pay on a standard contract.
O2 refresh gives you flexibility and control
Of course the split won’t always be an even fifty-fifty, but it will always put you in a position to save money, and you have some control over the split too, as you can opt to pay more for your phone upfront, so that the monthly phone charge is less, or you can pay little to nothing upfront and spread it out over the length of the contract.
On top of that, you can also change your allowances (the Airtime Plan) up or down once a month, even once you’ve taken out the contract.
Plus, when you do want to upgrade, whether you do so early or wait until the end of your contract, you can sell your old phone to O2 Recycle and put the money towards a new one.
And while O2 Refresh is technically two bills, they both come out at the same time, so it doesn’t feel any different to paying one, and even if you don’t upgrade early or you wait beyond the end of your contract to upgrade, you’re still not paying any more than you would on a standard contract.
If you want to give O2 Refresh a try then just take out an O2 contract, as all new ones are Refresh ones – but only when bought direct from O2.
Head over to O2 Refresh to find out more.
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