Personal Financial Contributions ($ care recipients pay)

How your care is funded

Your Support at Home package is paid for two ways:

• A government subsidy
• Your personal contribution, an amount set by Centrelink (government) and based on your income. You can estimate it here.

What is the Wallet?

The Wallet is a small reserve of your own money we hold to pay your care providers on time.
Think of it like a float. Instead of billing you each time an invoice arrives, we keep a buffer ready so payments go out smoothly without delays. The money is held safely in trust, it is always yours.

The buffer is usually around two weeks’ worth of your expected contributions.
You don’t manage it. We handle everything.

How does it get topped up?

When the balance drops below the minimum, it is topped up automatically by direct debit. You’ll get a notification each time.

We can’t notify you a few days in advance, top-ups are triggered by invoices as they arrive, and those can’t be predicted ahead of time.

Default minimum balance: Two weeks of your budgeted personal contribution.
Optional: rounded buffer (recommended)

Based on experience managing packages for thousands of clients, we suggest rounding up to:

• Minimum balance: $100 (or the nearest $100 above your two-week default)
• Top-up amount: $200 (or the nearest $200 above your default)

This is not a requirement. The exact minimum can be requested to be different, just be aware it may result in more frequent top-ups, sometimes on consecutive days, and will delay service provider payments.

Why bother?

Invoices don’t arrive evenly, some weeks are quiet, others have several at once. A slightly higher, rounded buffer means fewer top-ups (aveage 13 a year, considering the direct debit is a four week budgeted value), no back-to-back direct debits, ensuring fast service provider payments and a simple amount that’s easy to remember.