Featured Image Credit: Martin Lewis/moneysavingexpert/YouTube /NurPhoto/Contributor/Getty
Getting the latest iPhone each year is a privilege that is desperately expensive, but what if you could massively streamline the cost?
It turns out that there are pretty straightforward ways to minimize how much you have to spend to get a new iPhone annually - even the latest iPhone 15 - if you're willing to put the work in.
Plenty of people use Apple's own annual upgrade plan, of course. It's called the iPhone Upgrade Programme, and is enticingly simple.
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You sign up to pay for an iPhone over the course of 24 months with a credit agreement (and a credit check that you need to pass), but after 12 months you get the option to void that agreement and restart a new one with the latest phone.
If you do this, you just swap phones and carry on with life, but there are some major downsides. Firstly, you only get to actually own your phone if you finish the full 24-month programme, or pay the bill off entirely at an earlier point. If you change every 12 months, you'll never actually get money back for your phone.
Secondly, the monthly price can get really high since Apple bundles in its AppleCare+ programme for insurance and repairs, and you can't choose not to pay for this. Essentially, this means you're paying a pretty large premium for convenience.
Now, a financially-savvy writer from Martin Lewis' site MoneySavingExpert has run the numbers and suggests there's a way more efficient to just mirror this upgrade system yourself.
Nick Durrant has revealed that you should instead just buy an iPhone outright, and then sell it yourself after a year - and use the money to buy a new one.
This could see you net the biggest amount of money back into your wallet since basically every iPhone is still worth at least half of its price when it's been out for a year.
If you don't want to go through the legwork of selling a phone on eBay or Facebook Marketplace, meanwhile, you could even just use Apple's own trade-in offers - you might find it would still work out as a better deal.
This does come with some caveats, though - for one, if you were to drop or seriously damage your phone while you have it, you'd either have to pay repair costs or have the resale value slashed.
Durrant also says that if the resale market itself were to crash, it would change his calculations. Still, at present, buying and selling a phone yourself could save you hundreds over the course of a few years - and considering the most expensive version of the latest model, the iPhone 15 Pro Max, sets you back around $1599, any way you can save money can only be a good thing.
