The great mobile bill scam! The average American wastes $600 a YEAR on unused mobile data
- Americans spend $50 a month on excessive cell phone plans, according to a new report
- About 83 percent of users pay for an unlimited data plan, but 72 percent never use more than 15 GB.
- Separate data shows that cell phone bills rose nearly 5 percent each year between 2013 and 2020.
Americans are wasting about $50 a month, or $600 a year, on their cell phone bill paying for data they don’t use, according to a new report.
About 83 percent of consumers pay for an unlimited data plan, but most use less than 15 gigabytes (GB) per month, according to a study by the comparison website. whistleout.
The survey of 1,000 adults found that, on average, consumers spend $160 per month for a phone plan with one of the major carriers, including T-Mobile, Verizon and AT&T.
Customers rely on data to connect to the Internet when they’re not using Wi-Fi, but many don’t realize they’re spending too much on an unnecessary contract.
Carriers offer unlimited plans, the findings found, because they know customers won’t check their data usage, and one in five people don’t know how to check how much data they receive in a month.
The average American is wasting about $50 per month, or a whopping $600 per year, on their cell phone bill.
About 72 percent of Americans use less than 15 GB a month
Meanwhile, customers, increasingly dependent on their mobile phones, are opting for unlimited plans for fear of running out of data.
Unlimited plans aren’t actually “unlimited” but offer data up to a certain limit, which is usually around 25GB.
WhistleOut found that 20 percent of people use less than 5 GB a month, 30 percent use 5 to 10 GB, and 22 percent use 10 to 15 GB.
This meant that the vast majority, around 72 percent, use less than 15 GB a month, while the remaining 28 percent reported using more than 15 GB.
And of those with an unlimited plan, according to the study, 46 percent used less than 10 GB.
According to the study, one of the main reasons for data waste is the drop in the price of mobile data per gigabyte.
Since 2018, prices have fallen 40 percent, from $4.64 to $2.75. But despite falling prices per gigabyte, carrier costs per plan are rising.
The most recent data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows cell phone plans increased about 4.7 percent year-over-year between 2013 and 2020.
Using the trend line of this data, WhistleOut estimates that the current average phone plan costs about $114 a month, or $1,371 a year.
Only 13 percent of Americans use data at home, as most use WiFi, which also substantially reduces the amount of cell phone data they need.
It comes after separate data showed that households were wasting $25.34 a month on unused subscription services.
The average American household has 4.4 paid subscriptions worth $52.97 a month, according to a survey of 1,106 people by credit building company Self-Financial.
The data found that Disney+ was the most unused streaming video subscription, with 29.3 percent of people who paid saying they hadn’t used it in the last 30 days. Disney+ membership costs start at $7.99.
It was followed by Amazon Prime Video and Netflix, each of which saw 22.3 and 22.2 percent of users, respectively, say they hadn’t watched them in the last month.
