When reviewing your monthly household accounts, the most effective way to reduce costs without sacrificing your quality of life (QOL) is to reduce fixed costs. Among these, the first thing you should review is your smartphone’s communication costs (data plan). Do you somehow continue to use an expensive plan from a major carrier because you’ve been under contract for a long time or because the process of changing plans is troublesome? It is not uncommon to save tens of thousands of yen to hundreds of thousands of yen a year just by reviewing your communication costs.

The first thing you need to do is to accurately understand how much data you actually use each month. You can check from your contracted carrier’s My Page or app. In today’s world where we are often in a Wi-Fi environment, there are many people who only use around 3GB to 5GB per month. However, signing up for an unlimited plan or a large 20GB plan is like throwing away money.

If your monthly data usage is less than 20GB, we strongly recommend switching to a cheap SIM (MVNO) or a major carrier’s online-only plan (ahamo, povo, LINEMO, etc.). For example, if you change your monthly communication fee from 7,000 yen with a major carrier to a 3GB plan with a cheap SIM, the monthly fee will be in the 1,000 yen range, which will save you more than 60,000 yen per year. If you switch for a family of four, the difference could be more than 200,000 yen per year.

Some people worry that low-cost SIMs have slow communication speeds, but although they may be a little slow during lunch breaks, they rarely cause stress during daily use, such as web browsing, viewing SNS, and interacting with LINE.

The procedure for ``MNP (mobile phone number portability),’’ which allows you to carry over your phone number, can now be done very easily online. Just by taking the time to spend an hour on your day off, you can save money that will last a lifetime. Please take a look at your smartphone plan this weekend.