What do you do with your old phone after buying a new one?

Publish date: 2023-05-30

Whether you buy phones outright or pay for them on monthly installment plans through your carrier, upgrading to the latest and greatest mobile tech is always an exciting time.

However, after you finally take a break from playing around with your new toy, there comes a time when you need to figure out what to do with your old phone. Should you sell it? Keep it for old-times sake? Maybe find someplace you can recycle it at?

There are a lot of different ways to answer this question, and to help break it down, here's how the AC forum community responded to it.

Normally I keep all of them. I recently tried to sell two of my S7 Edge phones, my Note 8 and a few iPhones. All I got was lowball offers so I figured I would just keep the phones. We have a guy at my job who was in prison for a while and has been doing some good things in his life and even got his monitor taken off and is proving he's a good guy in everything he does. He didn't even have a...

anon(5719825)

I keep my very first device. I have a few low cost Android devices as a backup, but I typically sell them on swappa to help pay for a newer device.

tony bag o donuts

Very interesting thread - love it! I keep my old one as a backup in case something happens to my new phone. Lately, however, my brother and boyfriend will make use of my backup phone (s) until they get new ones. 😃

Morty2264

I go back to an old Motorola MicroTAC. The only phones I haven't kept are mobiles (yes, we used to have a radio mounted in the trunk and a control head with a handset on the hump, under the dashboard) and my bag phones. But by the time I buy a new phone, the last one isn't worth anything - it's not worth the trouble of putting a phone on Letgo for $150, only to get offers of $50.

Rukbat

I've kept a few phones over the years that have some sort of sentimental value to them, but for the most part, I usually go the route of selling them (opens in new tab) to help lower the cost of whatever I'm upgrading to.

What about you? What do you do with your old phone after you buy a new one?

Join the conversation in the forums!

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