Trading In Your Old Phone? Here's How to Get the Best Value.
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Here's your money briefing for Thursday, March 24th. I'm J.R. Whalen for The Wall Street Journal. Ready to upgrade to a new smartphone? They're not cheap, but if you can catch the right deal, you'll be able to trade in your current phone or even one you've got socked away in a drawer for cash toward a new one.
Everyone I talked to said the time to trade in your phone is now. If you're thinking about it and you have an old phone you don't use, the values drop daily, basically.
So how can you make sure you'll get the best trade-in value for your phone? Our personal tech news editor, Shara Tipkin, has been running the numbers. She'll join us to talk about it after the break.
This podcast is brought to you by ReliaQuest. Cyber criminals are constantly attacking. They want your data. They want your identity. They want your innovation. ReliaQuest fortifies your business with agentic defense, AI that detects, contains, and eliminates cyber threats in minutes. It helps your security team move faster at the work that matters most to protect the business now and delivers insights to help them predict what's next. ReliaQuest, agentic defense for the enterprise. Learn more at ReliaQuest.com. That's R-E-L-I-A-Q-U-E-S-T.com.
That old smartphone you got packed away in a drawer somewhere may be collecting dust, but it can also help you collect cash if you can score the right deal. So what do you need to do to get the best trade-in value for your retired phone? For some tips, I'm joined by the WSJ's Shara Tibkin. Shara, thank you so much for being here.
Thanks for having me.
So, you know, Shara, we often see advertising for trade-in deals offered by phone carriers. Why do they offer these deals and what do they get from it?
So these aren't charity. They're not trying to really help us out. What they're doing is trying to get everybody to move to their 5G networks as quickly as possible. That's a big factor right now. But these carriers have also discovered over the years that it's a lot cheaper to keep a current customer and keep them happy versus having to spend a lot of money on marketing and service deals and other sort of offers to woo somebody from another carrier. So what they'll do is they will have offers that will try to get you to switch your carrier, but now we're really seeing a lot of those wireless companies have those same deals for their existing customers.
Okay, so what are the biggest factors that go into determining the trade-in value of a phone?
It's kind of the things that you expect. What is the quality of the phone? Is the screen broken? Does it turn on? Is the battery dead? What sort of model is it? How old is it? How much storage is in it? Typically, the more you pay for a phone when you get it up front, the more you'll get back for it when you trade it in. So if you're getting the iPhone 11 with the highest amount of storage, you can usually get more when you're trading it in because there's that higher value. Another really big factor is whether your phone is tied to a specific wireless carrier or whether it's unlocked. So unlocked means the phone can be used across all of the carriers. That means that there's just a much wider market for who can rebuy the phone.
So you will get more money for that typically.
Are there any kinds of restrictions that are usually attached to trade-in deals?
It really depends on where you're trading it in. So if you're going to a third party, there's not really restrictions. They take most phones.
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