Category Archives: Centrelink

Five ways to fund aged care

  Placing a parent in an aged care facility can be a distressing time for families. It is not a pleasant experience financially either. Since the federal government introduced aged care reforms in July 2014, collectively families have been forced to find an extra $3 billion a year to move an elderly relative into an

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Residential aged care for pensioners

The government will subsidise aged care for elderly people with low means June Daley*, 93, shared her home with her daughter Marjorie, 66, for 15 years before she moved into residential aged care. The aged pensioner had savings of about $80,000 but nowhere near the $300,000 refundable accommodation deposit her preferred care home was asking. Marjorie

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Inside aged care facilities

You’ve seen the brochures and driven past the building; but the only way to really know whether an aged care facility might be the right one for you is to look inside. First impressions count for a lot but it is also important to get an understanding of how they operate to know whether it

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The cost of aged care

The accommodation component of aged care is no small amount. Accommodation prices currently published by providers on the government website My Aged Care range between $50,000 and $2,000,000, with an average price of $359,000. The RAD is the lump sum payment which can charged by a facility. Those that can afford it will pay what

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‘Tis the season for aged care placement

Family gatherings can be full of emotion at the best of times, but there is nothing like the festive season to bring out the best and worst of people. For many the chance to get together would have been a reality check on how senior family members are faring. It might have been when everyone

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Do you sell the house to fund aged care?

To sell or not to sell the family home is one of the most often asked questions when it comes to trying to work out the best way to fund aged care accommodation costs.  Trying to work out the money implications of different ways to fund aged-care accommodation can be mind boggling. Aged-care specialist Later

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Aged care assessments wrong

Six months into a new means testing process for individuals entering aged care, only one in five people are being given correct information about their income and assets. Getting it wrong means that some people are being asked to pay an amount of money for care that they don’t have, while others who can afford

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Navigating the aged care maze

The following article first appeared in the Australian Financial Review: Deirdre Border knew it was time to talk to her 84-year-old mother, Margaret, about stepping up her care needs when she arrived to find the water to her home had been cut off. What Deirdre hadn’t realised was that Margaret had unpaid utility bills going

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