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Most of the debate about consumer debt in Australia happens without anyone quoting the actual regulator.

ASIC Regulatory Guide 96 — the debt-collection guideline for creditors and collectors — runs to 63 pages. Two paragraphs of it define the operating window for anyone doing hardship work.

RG 96.9 says a creditor "should take particular care" when dealing with a debtor "experiencing serious health problems." RG 96.11 requires that a hardship application — supported by evidence, including medical evidence — be considered on its merits, not against a boilerplate policy.

That is the whole statutory basis for the work Life Without Debt funds.

We don’t forgive debt. We don’t discharge debt. We don’t "eliminate" debt. Debt discharge happens under the Bankruptcy Act, not RG 96.

What we do is fund a licensed mediator — Credit Mediation Services Pty Ltd, ACL 387398 — to submit a properly evidenced hardship application on behalf of a household where the primary earner is receiving a terminal-illness prognosis. The creditor then makes a decision under RG 96.

In our Y1 pilot, 31 households completed that process. Across them, $1.82M in consumer debt was resolved — a mix of waivers, restructures, and settlements below the original balance. Average time from intake to resolution: 23 days. Individual outcomes vary, and mediation may result in reduced or waived debt in some cases — it never guarantees an outcome.

If you work in credit, collections, hardship, or ESG at a bank, insurer, or super fund: RG 96 is the standard your teams are already operating under. The question worth asking is whether the hardship applications that reach your desk are being submitted with the medical evidence and professional advocacy the guidance contemplates.

More often than not, they aren’t.

That gap is the operating space of Life Without Debt.

Company details: lifewithoutdebt.org (in formation) · DGR endorsement pending · audited Y1 numbers at lifewithoutdebt.org/prospectus.

Twenty-three days.

That is the average time between the first intake conversation with a Life Without Debt household and the point where the primary creditor issues a written response to the hardship application.

The number matters because time is the scarce resource for a household where the primary earner has a terminal-illness prognosis. Every week the debt situation is unresolved is a week the family cannot focus on care planning, on preparing children, on doing anything other than opening mail from collections.

In our Y1 pilot, 31 households went through this process. The 23-day average is real, audited, and slower than the person on the other end of the intake call ever wants to hear.

Here is what happens in those 23 days.

Days 1–3: Intake. A structured conversation, a K10 psychological-distress baseline, a hardship-eligibility check against RG 96, and a signed consent to authorise the mediator (Credit Mediation Services Pty Ltd, ACL 387398) to act.

Days 4–9: Evidence pack. Medical evidence letter from the treating specialist, financial position statement, list of creditors in priority order, current-hardship narrative in the household’s own words.

Days 10–16: Mediator submits and negotiates. Formal hardship application lodged with each creditor; substantive back-and-forth — creditors ask for clarifications, additional evidence, or timeframe adjustments. This is where sector experience matters and where an unrepresented household routinely gets stuck.

Days 17–23: Creditor decisions. Written responses arrive — some quickly, some at the RG 96 deadline. Outcomes vary by creditor and by the specifics of the application; mediation may result in reduced or waived debt in some cases.

At Day 23 average, the family knows where they stand.

If you work in hardship, collections, or clinical social work: 23 days is the number to hold in your head when you’re thinking about what "professional advocacy" actually shortens. Without it, the average is measured in months, and the household spends those months in the mail queue.

Audited Y1 numbers: lifewithoutdebt.org/prospectus.

Here is the structural argument for why banks should fund Life Without Debt, and here is why it isn’t the argument most charities make.

Australian banks, insurers, and super funds are the creditors that our sector negotiates with under statutory hardship provisions. Their collections teams are one side of the conversation. That is not a criticism. It is the design of the consumer credit system: someone extends credit, someone else pursues it when it doesn’t come back, and hardship provisions exist because the alternative — blanket enforcement without regard to circumstance — is neither commercial nor lawful.

The paradox: when a household is facing a terminal-illness prognosis, the sector that extended the credit is also the sector that possesses, systemically, the least practicable capacity to identify that specific situation without a professionally submitted hardship application. Collections teams are trained on portfolio risk, not on medical prognosis. The information asymmetry is structural.

That gap is where our sector — consumer advocacy, credit mediation, hardship representation — operates. And it is where a bank’s ESG position can be materially stronger than "we donated to a general community-investment fund."

A bank that funds Life Without Debt is not making a charitable donation into an unrelated cause. It is funding a mechanism that submits properly evidenced hardship applications to its own collections queues on behalf of a specific, small, medically-defined population. The applications then follow RG 96. The bank retains its full commercial and legal discretion. Life Without Debt does not lobby, litigate, or campaign against creditors. We submit the paperwork — well, and with medical evidence — that RG 96 already contemplates.

The result, for the bank’s sustainability reporting, is causal: the bank funded professional advocacy; that advocacy submitted applications on behalf of X households; Y outcomes were achieved; Z dollars of consumer debt were resolved. GRI 413 disclosure standard is happy. The audit trail is clean. The population is small enough to be reportable without confidentiality risk. Our Y1 audited numbers: 31 households, $1.82M resolved, 23-day average, 87 cents in the dollar to direct household services.

We are not asking any bank to change its credit or collections policy. We are pointing out that funding the applications RG 96 already anticipates — submitted by a licensed mediator (ACL 387398), with medical evidence, at scale — is a more defensible sustainability position than any general community-investment donation.

That is the argument. The audited data is at lifewithoutdebt.org/prospectus. Mediation may result in reduced or waived debt in some cases — individual outcomes vary.

The gap in most Australian corporate sustainability reports isn’t the number of dollars donated. It’s the causal claim behind them.

I’ve read the community-investment sections of the last three sustainability reports from each of Australia’s big-four banks and top-tier insurers. They are, largely, well-produced. They cite dollar totals, they cite programs supported, they carry photographs. What they mostly do not carry is a specific, measurable, causal claim about the outcome the bank’s funding produced in a defined population.

That absence is not the reporters’ fault. It is the fault of the funding models most large Australian corporates use — general community-investment partnerships where the connection between a bank’s dollars and a specific outcome is intentionally distant.

GRI 413 — the Global Reporting Initiative disclosure standard for local communities — asks reporters to describe "the significant actual and potential negative impacts on local communities" and the operations that address them. The standard rewards causal specificity. It penalises vague community-investment totals.

The mechanism-not-donation position that a partner of Life Without Debt can occupy is unusually GRI 413-friendly. The chain of causation is short: partner funding → professional hardship advocacy delivered by a licensed mediator (ACL 387398) → RG 96-compliant applications submitted → measurable outcomes reported at the household level. Our Y1 audited numbers are the report line-items: 31 households served, $1.82M consumer debt resolved, 23-day average time to resolution, 87c of every dollar to direct household services.

That is a defensible sustainability report line. It is not "we donated to a charity." It is "we funded a program whose Y1 audited outcomes are these specific numbers, verified by an independent auditor, in a defined population."

If you write, edit, or sign off on a sustainability report at an ADI, insurer, or super fund: the number of causal claims in your community-investment section is a leading indicator of how the report reads to a serious external assessor. Most reports carry zero. Adding one is a low-effort, high-return editorial move — provided the underlying program is genuinely causal.

Our audited numbers, methodology notes, and the ACL 387398 register are all at lifewithoutdebt.org/prospectus. Individual outcomes vary; mediation may result in reduced or waived debt in some cases.

Eighty-seven cents.

That is what our independent auditor found, for the Y1 pilot: 87 cents of every dollar received by Life Without Debt went to direct household services — mediator fees, medical evidence support, hardship-application preparation, case worker time on the phone with creditors.

The remaining 13 cents covered governance, compliance, insurance, and the technology platform that runs case files. Nothing else.

We are naming this figure carefully, because ratio metrics are the easiest number in the charity sector to game and the easiest to misread.

Three things we are not saying with the 87c figure.

First, that ratio efficiency is the right primary measure for a charity. It isn’t. Cost-per-outcome, outcomes-per-cohort, and the quality of the underlying methodology matter more than the overhead ratio. We publish 87c because Y1 partners asked for it, not because it is the most important number.

Second, that 87c is stable. It isn’t. In a Y1 pilot of 31 households, a lot of governance and platform cost is amortised across a small denominator. As Y2 scales, the ratio may move up or down — more households will improve amortisation; expanded governance for a growing organisation will offset it. We’ll publish the Y2 figure when it’s audited, whichever way it moves.

Third, that a lower overhead ratio is always better. There is a floor below which governance, compliance, and clinical supervision become inadequate. A charity operating consumer credit mediation at 95c or 96c to services is almost certainly under-investing in the licensure, professional indemnity, and case supervision the work requires. We would rather run at 85c properly-supervised than 95c under-supervised.

The audited breakdown, methodology, and full financial notes are at lifewithoutdebt.org/prospectus. Individual outcomes vary; mediation may result in reduced or waived debt in some cases; ratio metrics are a leading indicator of operational discipline but not a substitute for outcome data.

If you assess charities professionally — CSR, ESG, philanthropy advisor, community-investment analyst — the 87c figure is a starting point for a conversation, not a conclusion.

The Kessler Psychological Distress Scale — K10 — is a ten-item screen used across Australian clinical practice and epidemiology. It doesn’t diagnose. It measures how much psychological distress a respondent reports experiencing over the previous four weeks.

We use K10 twice for every Life Without Debt case: at intake, and at case closure.

In the Y1 pilot, across 31 households, the average K10 score at closure was 52 percent lower than the score at intake. In plain language: on average, the people we worked with reported roughly half the psychological distress at the end of the mediation process than they did when they walked in.

That is a strong signal. It is also, on its own, an incomplete one, and I want to be honest about the caveats.

Caveat one: sample size. Thirty-one households is a Y1 pilot cohort, not a research trial. The 52% average is the arithmetic mean; the median and the distribution matter too, and I’d encourage anyone assessing our work to look at both, which we publish in the methodology notes.

Caveat two: attribution. The K10 change captures the household’s psychological state before and after mediation. It does not, and cannot, isolate the debt-resolution effect from other things happening in the same 23-day window — palliative care support, family conversations, adjustments to work or care arrangements. The right way to read the number is "the household’s distress was lower at closure than at intake, and debt was one of the things resolved in the interval." Not "we caused a 52% distress reduction."

Caveat three: reversion. K10 measures a four-week window. A reduction at case closure is a genuine signal about the mediation-window experience. It is not a claim about six-month or twelve-month outcomes, because we don’t follow up at those windows in Y1.

We publish the number with all three caveats attached. If you assess health-and-wellbeing programs professionally, you know why the caveats matter more than the headline number.

Full methodology, distribution, and Y2 follow-up plan are at lifewithoutdebt.org/prospectus. K10 methodology reference: Kessler et al., 2002. Mediation may result in reduced or waived debt in some cases; individual outcomes vary.

$1,840.

That is the Y1 audited average cost, to Life Without Debt, of taking a single household from intake through to a mediator’s written outcome. It covers the licensed mediator’s fees, the medical evidence letter, case worker time, hardship-application preparation, and the case’s share of governance and platform cost.

The ratio worth writing down: for every $1,840 in Y1 cost, an average of $58,700 in consumer debt was resolved for the household. That is roughly 32 dollars of consumer debt resolved for every dollar spent.

We are naming this ratio carefully. Three things it means, and three things it does not.

What it means. First, that the unit-economics of professional hardship advocacy, done by a licensed mediator with medical evidence, are unusually strong compared with self-representation in the same regulatory framework. RG 96 rewards evidence, and evidence takes professional time to compile. Second, that a corporate partner funding this program has, per dollar contributed, a materially large denominator of resolved debt to describe in a sustainability report. Third, that as we scale, the cost-per-case will likely fall — not dramatically, but enough to matter — because governance and platform costs amortise.

What it does not mean. First, that the ratio is stable. Y1 is a pilot. Cost per case may drift up if we take on more complex creditor mixes in Y2, or down if platform amortisation dominates. We’ll publish the Y2 audited figure when it’s available. Second, that "$1,840 to resolve $58,700 of debt" reads like a savings figure to the household. It doesn’t. Individual outcomes vary; mediation may result in reduced or waived debt in some cases; not every dollar of the $58,700 is fully waived — some is restructured, some settled below balance, some reclassified. Third, that unit-economic strength is the same as social impact. It is a necessary condition for scaled operation, not a sufficient one.

If you assess programs professionally — philanthropy advisor, CSR analyst, ESG lead — the ratio number is a conversation-starter. The audited methodology, the case-by-case breakdown, and the Y2 forward view are all at lifewithoutdebt.org/prospectus.

The most honest post in this October series is this one, and it’s about what our Y1 pilot did not measure.

We have written this month about 31 households, $1.82M of consumer debt resolved, 23-day average mediation timeline, 52% average K10 psychological-distress reduction, 87 cents to direct household services, and $1,840 average cost per case. Those are the audited numbers, and they are real.

They are also, at Y1, a partial picture of the program’s effect. Four things we did not measure, and are building into Y2.

One. Six- and twelve-month household follow-up. Y1 measured the intake-to-closure window — roughly 23 days. It did not follow the household through the next six or twelve months to see whether the debt situation stayed resolved, whether the psychological-distress reduction held, or whether new debt appeared. Y2 introduces a light-touch three-, six-, and twelve-month follow-up conversation.

Two. Creditor-side effects. We measured what happened for the household. We did not measure what happened on the creditor’s side of the ledger — whether our applications changed the way collections teams process subsequent hardship applications from adjacent households, or whether they were treated as one-off outcomes. Y2 introduces a lightweight creditor-side qualitative review, subject to the creditors’ willingness to participate.

Three. Cost avoided in the health system. Anecdotally, several Y1 households reported that resolving debt reduced their need for GP mental-health-plan visits, hospital emergency-department attendances driven by acute anxiety, and other health-system contacts. We did not systematically measure this. Y2 introduces a self-reported health-system-contact question at intake and closure. It won’t stand up as clinical evidence on its own, but it will be a starting-point number.

Four. Referral quality by source. Y1 households came from a mix of palliative-care referrers, health social workers, and self-referrals. We recorded source but did not analyse outcome variation by source. Y2 tags each case at intake and reports the variation in a Y2 supplementary methodology note.

We are naming what we didn’t measure because that is what corporate partners — and, honestly, we ourselves — need to know when reading the Y1 headline numbers. Individual outcomes vary; mediation may result in reduced or waived debt in some cases; and Y1 is a pilot, not a completed programme.

Full Y1 methodology and Y2 roadmap: lifewithoutdebt.org/prospectus. Thank you to everyone who has read this series — comments, questions, and quiet DMs welcome.