Spokesperson one-pager

[Prepared answer will be authored by Laurence at CMO sight-check. 60-90 seconds. Should include: the observed gap in Australian services; why this intersection specifically; what LWD does differently.]

Financial counsellors are exceptional at what they do, and they are the right first port of call for many people in financial hardship. What Life Without Debt does is more narrow and more deep: we take on people whose lives have been complicated by serious illness, we develop a full picture of their consumer debt with them, and then we act on their behalf directly — negotiating with creditors, corresponding with collection agents, applying for hardship — until each debt is resolved. Financial counsellors typically advise and coach; we do the work.

I can tell you the pattern we see. What I will not do — and this is not just my policy, it is our Board-adopted Beneficiary Depiction Guardrails — is describe an individual beneficiary in a way that could identify them, unless that beneficiary has given fully informed, revocable, written consent, and even then only if they have expressed a wish to be identified. Beneficiaries come to us at the worst time of their lives. Turning that into charity marketing without their consent would be a betrayal. If you are interested in the pattern — the shape of illness meeting debt in Australia — I can talk about that at length.

Individual donations — one-off and monthly. Gifts in wills. Corporate partnerships where the corporate's own hardship framework aligns with our practice. Grants from foundations. We publish our reporting methodology, our budget architecture, and our unit-cost calculation on our website — including things we might get wrong. Our first Annual Impact Report will be measured against a spine adopted before we served our first beneficiary.

Mortgage debt, tax debt, and business debt sit outside our scope. Those need specialist advocates — mortgage brokers, tax agents, insolvency practitioners, business turnaround advisors — and we refer to them. We do consumer debt: credit cards, personal loans, buy-now-pay-later, telco and utility arrears, small informal debts. That is what we are for.

This is common and it is part of what we plan for. Where a beneficiary loses capacity to consent during our engagement, we work with their nominated substitute decision maker under the relevant state framework. Where a beneficiary passes away, we continue the work with their executor or nominated family member so that the debt does not fall on the estate in ways that harm the family. Nothing is picked up mid-crisis and dropped; the discipline of the service is that it sees things through.

The regulatory landscape around BNPL is evolving and we welcome that. Our operational observation, from the pattern we see, is that BNPL balances stack quickly and become disproportionately painful for people in illness because the small individual instalments hide the total exposure. We do not comment on named BNPL providers. We advocate for the same protections in hardship that other consumer credit already enjoys.

There are adjacent services and they are extraordinary — financial counsellors, the National Debt Helpline, hospital hardship desks, palliative-care social workers, condition-specific patient advocacy charities. What has not existed is a service dedicated to this exact intersection — serious illness plus consumer debt, on the person's side of the table, from intake through to resolution. That is what LWD is for. We coordinate with the adjacent services rather than compete with them.

Our website is cosailifewithoutdebt.org. There is an intake form at cosailifewithoutdebt.org/intake. For clinicians, cosailifewithoutdebt.org/referrer-pack. For carers, cosailifewithoutdebt.org/carers. We also have FAQ at cosailifewithoutdebt.org/beneficiary-faq. Everything is designed to make asking for help as low-friction as possible.