I’ve signed up to a 24-month contract with Optus for an iPhone on a 61 dollar plan. I rationalised it accordingly:
- Previously I’ve been on prepaid with Optus and recharging about once a month, sometimes more, at a rate of $30 a recharge.
- Do be neat, let’s say I was recharging at a rate of 36 dollars a month. Then my new additional fees are 25 dollars a month over 24 months.
- This totals $600 of what appears to be unnecessary fees. However, one should bear in mind that my existing phone has been on its last dying breaths lately (it’s unable to send SMS’s now.) so I needed a new phone.
- Considering I needed a new phone, we can assume I’d have bought one of approx. $200. This leaves $400 of unnecessary fees in my decision.
- However! My old phone was also my music player, so I would need a new iPod as well. Assuming I were to buy a basic music playing iPod (i.e not an iPod Touch) then the closest would be the $250 8GB iPod Nano. Let’s extrapolate and pretend there was a 16GB Nano at $300 (being conservative here.)
- That leaves $100 of unnecessary fees in my decision, I can justify this by the fact that I’ve spent $100 on: maintaining the convenience of having my phone and iPod as a single unit, gaining the ability to check emails and RSS feeds on the train, owning something really swish.
So there you have it, my rationalised iPhone buying frenzy. This whole experience will also be a lesson for me I believe, as I’ve never signed up to an actual contract before and I look forward to the benefits and problems I expect to endure.
