use existing balance on prepaid plan

[hoek]

If you have a balance on prepaid, is there any way to actually use it to pay for the plan?

Trying to help my father out who has had a Talk + Messaging 10 plan for ages.  He currently has balance of $111 and has been topping up automatically with $10 every 30 days.  I'm not entirely sure how he accumulated the balance and am told it was at one time $300 or more.   Is there any way to use the existing balance to fund the plan instead of taking from a credit card?  He tells me Telus "did something" in the past to that effect and hence why the balance came down from 300.

Current plans/features screen shows this:

I stopped the auto top up and now the top up screen shows this:

So the feature expires Oct 6 and will be paid for by the balance.  BUT the balance expires on Oct 12 and if you don't top it up before then you lose it.  So effectively there will be an "excess" balance sitting there that can never be used.

Not sure I understand the point of keeping that excess balance there.

Hopefully my question makes sense.

thanks

[NFtoBC]

It's been a while since I used prepaid, but there is no simple solution, other than buying a more expensive plan or add-ons. Telus did address the issue for a while of those large balances, but I'm not sure if they continued it. Is there tax charged on the top up amount? If not, the existing balance should decline by the amount of the tax each month.

[hoek]

Thanks for the suggestion.

Only thing I see in transactions is -0.75 911 fee.  So I guess, all things being equal, the balance will be used up in 10+ years.

I guess I'd just like to know if the balance is money that was "already spent" or is available to be spent.  If it's already spent then I don't know why it shows anything at all.

[hoek]

Apologies, talking out loud here, but thought I'd note it in case anyone else wonders how this stuff works.

Previously the account balance was 111.27, and showed as expiring on Oct 12.

The account features, talk + messaging 10, showed as expiring on Oct 6.

The features were auto renewed from the balance on Oct 7 leaving the balance at 101.27.

The features now show as expiring on Nov 5 and the balance shows expiring on Nov 6.

So it appears that if you pick the option to auto renew from balance, the balance will indeed be debited and a new expiry date is set for the remaining balance.  However, the dates between feature and balance expiry are much tighter now.

It's pretty clear from this that you have to top up for your balance for it to be carried over.  https://www.telus.com/en/support/article/understand-prepaid-mobility-service

But, I didn't do anything the last round, and the balance WAS carried over (far as I can see) as the expiry is now Nov 6.  So, do I really have to top up or does paying for features from the balance also count as an action that rolls over the remaining balance?

Sooo all this makes me wonder, 1) will the current balance be soon wiped because I never topped up even though there is a new future date for expiry?  or 2) will the balance be ok, for now, and be wiped after the next feature renewal on Nov 5 when it will be "too late" for the balance to be renewed.

I know, I'm over analyzing.  Just top up the balance and move on...

But my goal is to use up the balance first then top up regularly as per usual and the last transaction makes it look like that's possible.