Six simple tips that can save you £60 on your phone bill

Digital hoarding could be costing you up to £60 per year (Picture: Getty Images)

If your phone is filled with thousands of photos, forgotten videos and barely used apps, you’re not alone – and it could be costing you more than you realise. 

New research by O2 has revealed that 3.3 million Brits have never decluttered their phone. And it comes at a cost. 

Nearly half (42%) of mobile users in the UK are paying for extra storage every month, with photos, videos and unused apps being the main culprits of storage consumption. 

Millennials may be the worst generation for digital hoarding.

According to the research, Millennials admit to paying over six times more than boomers pay over the course of a year for extra storage (£33.36 vs £4.80 respectively).

In fact, nearly one in six (17%) of Millennials pay £5 per month for additional storage, meaning cleaning out your storage could save you £60 a year.

Gig-goers may also find themselves forking out for extra storage. The O2 claims 76% of music fans take photos and videos every time they attend a concert, resulting in fans capturing an average of 14 minutes of content on their phones per concert. 

Concert goers may want to sort out their camera roll (Picture: Getty Images/Cavan Images RF)

O2 recommends clearing out your mobile phone at least once a month to keep on top of storage capacity and to stop your phone from becoming slow and inefficient. 

Virgin Media O2’s Director of Connectivity, Gareth Lister, shared six tips to clear up your phone storage.

His first tip? Say no to automatic saving. He says: ‘Check to see which apps automatically save images, apps like WhatsApp can add images to your photo album without you even realising.’

Gareth also suggests clearing out voice notes, videos and photos from your chat history. ‘These can unexpectedly take up a lot of space on your device, so remember to occasionally have a clear out and delete any content you don’t need to avoid unnecessary buildup.’

As a general rule, Gareth says, ‘once you’ve listened to it, delete it’. Podcasts, especially, can pile up and take up space when you subscribe to them.

‘File sizes can be between 25MB and 50MB per episode, so can very quickly dominate your device storage,’ he explains. 

Mobile phone users should also steer clear of filming in 4K, which requires significantly more storage space than lower resolutions like 1080p. ‘It has four times the number of pixels, meaning more data to store per frame,’ Gareth explains. 

Gareth also recommends organising and deleting apps you don’t use. ‘If you’ve not used an app in several weeks, consider whether you really need it,’ he says. 

And, finally, he urges gig-goers to carefully sift through their footage from concerts. ‘Do you really need 20 videos of one song?’

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