I’m one of the lucky ones. I use my smartphone perpetually for work, looking up current news, sharing between my various devices, checking social networking sites for feedback and interests, and I’m using all of this data for one low flat rate. I got in right under the wire earlier this year before Verizon’s new aggregated plans came out. With the increasingly data-heavy apps and user habits, companies are finding it difficult to provide unlimited data plans for a single rate, so they’ve switched to terraced plans where using more data means paying more dollars. For customers that means major overages if you’re not careful. Here are a few tricks that you can use (and me when I have to re-up in another 18 months), to transform your phone from a data hose to a data sieve and lower the chance of overage fees.

From Darren Murph of Popular Science, the following tips are easy fixes on your phone to slow the transmission of expensive data, without really giving up any of the phone’s capability.

Managing your phone’s settings can greatly reduce the amount of data your phone eats up each month. For instance, going to your social networking settings and reducing the frequency with which updates, emails, and other network services are pushed out to you can ease the bill a bit. In addition, look at auto-sync and makes sure it’s disabled. Finally, switch your apps with autoupdate features to manual for those things that you don’t need immediate updates. That way you’re only refreshing the app when you’re actually using it. These kinds of changes can drop your monthly data usage by hundreds of MBs.

Be sure that the browsers that you’re using on your tablet or phone. Murph suggests Opera Mini,  a free compact little app that will actually download your searched pages to the server, and then repackage them in a streamlined little packet for your viewing consumption. He also suggests Skyfire ($3) for YouTube users.

 A bit like Opera Mini, the Onavo app acts like a proxy server for Droid and iPhone users. It takes data from social networking sites and other data-rich environments and repackages them into easily consumable and light-data packets. In addition, Onavo won’t compress data sent by the user, so photos, videos, and such will always look as good as possible.

Hopefully with a bit of finagling with settings early on you can prevent the kind of data-overload overage fees that tend to ruin people’s new year.