Every child loves to have a trendy mobile phone. Children like to chat and text all the time and mobile phones have become a necessity for them to be in contact with their friends.

Parents are always concerned about the phone bills as sometimes they face some financial problems due to the increasing phone bills of their offspring.

Pay as You Go
Most parents like to use “pay-as-you-go” packages while funding a phone for their children. It allows them to buy the handset and a credit voucher, which can be used by the children to make calls, do texts and to also download anything they want. After running out of credit, one has to buy “top up” vouchers.

Monthly Contract
For those parents whose children run out of credit most of the time, monthly contract can be a great relief. With a contract, they have to pay a fixed amount each month for a set number of text and calls.

After passing the limit, parents have to pay at a much higher rate for any further usage of the mobile phone by their children.

When you compare contract and pay as you go you find that pay as you go packages costs are higher than contract packages, but after running out of credit you do not need to spend any more money. While the monthly contract, despite being cheaper, allows the kids to run up a big bill that the parents will not find out about until the end of the month.

Precautions with Contract Phones
It is recommended for the parents to take out the contract in their own name, in case they want their children to have the advantages of a contract package as minors will be unable to open a credit account for themselves. It will also allow them to check up the bills regularly and fix the expenses easily. It allows them to monitor who their children are calling and how much money is spent on every call.

For those who want strict control of the bills, pay as you go can be a better option but here are very few companies that allow monitoring each and every call under pay as you go packages.

Parents can also work with the service providers to fix a maximum limit on monthly bills while using contract packages. After passing the limits, their children can receive calls but will be unable to make them.

Parents can also ask the mobile phone operators to stop their children accessing inappropriate materials on the internet. While doing this, they cannot access chat rooms, allowing the parents to cut some extra expenses their children would otherwise be running up.

Your Decision
Both contract and pay as you go have their own advantages and disadvantages. It is up to the parents to decide which one will suit their child more. The question of which one to choose is always going to be there. The parents have to decide which payment plan best fits in with their financial planning.

Phil Turner has looked at Orange deals over the past few weeks and thinks that some of them are pretty good.