How to Maximize Your Telstra Pre-paid Mobile

Coles, Dick Smith, Woolworths, Australia Post and The Good Guys have been selling Telstra Pre-paid starter kits normally worth $30 for only $10 almost on a rotation basis. There is a way to make the most of these Telstra prepaid plans if you don't mind a bit of fiddling around. 

For rolling credit over - Activate it and choose "Longlife" which gives you six months to use the credit but once it is activated, you should change it to the "Simplicity" plan which can be done online.  The expiry date will not change. 

When you activate another $30 sim card, choose the "Encore" plan and transfer the $30 credit using creditme2u online to the first sim card. The second sim card wil lstill have $220 bonus credit plus the 400MB and free calls/texts between 6PM and 6AM on the Encore sim.

For tablets only - Activate it by calling Telstra up and activate the sim card for iPad which will give you no calls but 3GB of data to use in 30 days.

For mobile Foxtel - You can also activate a Mobile Foxtel trial which will last for 30 days. If you cancel it before the 30 days is up, you will still be able to continue your trial until the end of the 30 days.

For Apps - Another thing you can do is use part of your pre-paid Telstra credit to buy apps on Google Play store. When you go to purchase the app / movie / book or magazine, press the "Payment options" and then choose "bill to my Telstra account". This will only appear if you are using your pre-paid sim. If there is no enough credit, it will show an error.However, you can't purchase anything that is over $20 in one transaction.

If it's too confusing, another budget mobile plan is offered by TPG which we wrote about here a few years ago. That plan only costs $1 / month to maintain with cheap call rates and cheap text messaging. EDIT: This is no longer available from TPG.