Frequently asked questions

Australian households where at least one household member is living with a diagnosed life-limiting illness and is carrying personal, business, tax, or mortgage debt that is causing financial distress.

Referrals come from palliative-care teams, oncologists, GPs, hospital social workers, financial counsellors, or self-referral. Age, income, location within Australia, and debt size are not gating criteria — life-limiting illness plus financial distress is.

Any diagnosed condition where the expected trajectory is shortened life expectancy or where the person has been referred to palliative care. This includes but is not limited to advanced cancers, motor neurone disease, advanced heart failure, advanced COPD, end-stage renal disease, glioblastoma, and other neurodegenerative conditions.

We do not require a specific prognosis window. We take the treating clinician's letter as authoritative.

No. Self-referral is welcome. If you are approaching us directly, we will ask you to arrange a short letter from your treating clinician (GP, oncologist, palliative-care physician, or specialist) confirming the diagnosis. We do not need clinical detail beyond that — the diagnosis itself is what unlocks the hardship frameworks under Australian law.

Our primary focus is life-limiting illness. Where a person has been through treatment and is now in remission or a long-term chronic phase, we may still be able to help under the same hardship frameworks if financial distress from the illness period persists. Case-by-case; contact us.

Yes. Every case is free. There is no fee, no percentage-of-savings charge, no commission, and no hidden cost of any kind. Practitioner time is funded by donations to the charity. Households pay nothing.

You call or email us. A member of our team — a real Australian human, not a chatbot — takes a short intake call (usually 20–30 minutes). We ask about the diagnosis, the debts, the creditors involved, and what has already been tried. We take no payment information.

Within 48 hours of intake, we either confirm we can take the case or we refer you on to a partner service that fits your situation better. If we take the case, you sign a short authority document and we begin.

It appoints our licensed practitioner (Laurence Hugo, ACL 387398) as your authorised representative for the purpose of negotiating with your creditors. From the moment it is signed, creditors direct all contact to us. You stop getting calls, letters, and emails at home.

The authority is limited in scope: it covers the specific debts you list, and only for the purpose of hardship-negotiation. It does not give us access to your bank accounts, your assets, or any decision-making power beyond negotiation with the named creditors.

Creditor contact typically pauses within one to two weeks of us opening the file. Full case resolution ranges from four to sixteen weeks depending on complexity and creditor engagement. In every case, the household stops receiving direct creditor contact from the moment we take on the file.

We escalate. In order: internal dispute-resolution at the creditor, then the Australian Financial Complaints Authority (AFCA) for most consumer debts, or the ATO Complex Case team for tax debts. AFCA rules pause enforcement activity while a complaint is being considered. This is one of the strongest tools we have.

Everything can be done by phone, video, or email. If you are in a location where an in-person meeting is possible and would help, we do offer that. We work Australia-wide, and remote/rural households are one of the groups we specifically want to reach.

Under Australian law, the following debt categories have hardship frameworks that may result in reduced or waived debt for households facing serious illness:

• Credit-card debt
• Personal loans (bank and non-bank)
• Mortgage arrears
• ATO tax debts (income tax, GST, superannuation guarantee charge)
• Utility debts (electricity, gas, water)
• Telecommunications debts
• Buy-now-pay-later obligations
• Certain business debts under personal guarantee
• Some Centrelink debts (via ARO / hardship review)

Every case is different. Outcomes are not guaranteed. See our composite stories for representative examples.

Debts that fall outside consumer-hardship frameworks: fines and court judgments (though we can sometimes intervene on payment arrangements), family-law property-settlement debts, debts secured by criminal proceedings, and any debt you have already discharged in bankruptcy.

If we cannot help, we will tell you at intake and refer you to a service that can — usually a community legal centre, a financial counsellor via the National Debt Helpline (1800 007 007), or the Consumer Action Law Centre.

No. No one can. Australian consumer-credit law — and ASIC Regulatory Guide 96 in particular — requires anyone offering debt-management services to be careful about outcome claims. What we can say is: the frameworks exist, the frameworks work when applied properly, and our licensed practitioner has twenty years of experience applying them. Some cases result in full waiver. Some result in partial waiver, arrangement, or variation. Some resolve in ways we did not anticipate. Every case is different.

Being in hardship itself, or missing payments, is what damages a credit rating — not asking for help. Our advocacy sometimes results in an updated credit-file entry (for example, a default listing that gets reversed after a successful hardship decision). We flag credit-file implications explicitly with you before we act, and we prioritise credit-file remediation where it is available.

Life Without Debt Ltd has lodged its application for endorsement as a Deductible Gift Recipient (DGR Item 1) with the Australian Taxation Office. Until the DGR endorsement is issued, donations are not tax-deductible. We do not make any tax-deductibility claim to donors during this pre-endorsement period.

When DGR endorsement is granted, we will publish it publicly on this site and issue tax receipts for eligible donations from the endorsement date forward. Donors who wish to wait for DGR endorsement before giving are welcome to; donors who wish to give now to establish the service are gratefully received.

87 cents of every donated dollar goes to direct household services. The remaining 13 cents covers governance, compliance, and administration.

This ratio is possible because the licensed-practitioner infrastructure (Australian Credit Licence 387398, professional indemnity insurance, technology stack, back-office administration) is carried by our related-party entity Credit Mediation Services Pty Ltd under a formal service agreement, rather than by the charity itself. See Governance for the full two-entity structure.

Our working unit is: $50 funds one hour of licensed practitioner time. One hour of practitioner time, on average across our founder's twenty-year practice, may result in reduced or waived debt in the tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars for one Australian household. See Impact for the full model.

Yes. Regular giving is the backbone of Room C in our seven-room funding portfolio. $19.25 a week ($83 a month) funds one household for one year. Regular giving lets us commit practitioner capacity in advance rather than waiting for one-off donations to arrive.

Yes. Room B in our funding portfolio is for corporate partners — particularly banks and non-bank lenders who share our view that vulnerable-customer outcomes matter. Corporate partnerships range from workplace-giving programmes to co-branded referral pathways. Contact us at corporate@cosailifewithoutdebt.org.

The founding team is Laurence Hugo (Founding CEO, holder of Australian Credit Licence 387398 via Credit Mediation Services Pty Ltd), Lisa Hugo (Co-founder & Head of Philanthropy), and Carla Oliver CPA CIMA BA(Hons) Bus. (Board-Appointed CFO Advisor via CoSai CFO Services). Full Board formation, including independent directors, is underway. See Governance for the current state.

Life Without Debt Ltd is the charity. Credit Mediation Services Pty Ltd is the licensed practitioner entity that carries Australian Credit Licence No. 387398 and provides the negotiation services to cases referred by the charity, under a formal arm's-length service agreement.

This structure exists for a specific reason: keeping the ACL — a commercial licence that carries commercial obligations, professional indemnity, and complex compliance overhead — inside a commercial entity, while keeping the charity focused on charitable purpose. From Year 4 onwards, CMS absorbs the infrastructure costs that would otherwise dilute donation efficiency. This is what makes the 87c-on-the-dollar figure possible.

Case data lives on Australian-hosted infrastructure. We do not sell, share, or otherwise disclose client data to any third party without your explicit consent. Our Privacy Policy is aligned with the Australian Privacy Principles under the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth).

Donor data (for tax-receipt purposes when DGR is issued, and for regular-giving administration) is held to the same standard. We do not sell donor lists.

The ACNC (Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission) registration application has been lodged. Registration is a prerequisite for the ATO DGR endorsement, and we will publish both the ACNC registration and the DGR endorsement on this site as soon as each is issued. See Governance for current status.