This is a small charity built around one clear idea: that when people are facing serious illness, they should not also be fighting consumer debt.
Every year in Australia, hundreds of thousands of people are told that something is seriously wrong with their body, or the body of someone they love. In the weeks and months that follow, they navigate a complicated medical system, they organise their lives around treatment, and they try to hold together the ordinary business of being a family. Very often — more often than most people realise — they do all this while also carrying consumer debt. Credit cards. Personal loans. Buy-now-pay-later balances stacked three or four deep. Telco arrears. Small informal debts to family. The debt was manageable once. In illness it is not.
Life Without Debt exists to remove that particular burden for terminally ill Australians and for people living with life-limiting, chronic or serious illness — and their immediate families and primary carers. We are a charity that does casework: an intake conversation, a written plan the person agrees to, and then debt mediation — direct negotiation with creditors on the person's behalf until the consumer debt is resolved. It is free. It is Australia-wide. It is what we are for and it is all that we do.
Adjacent services in Australia are extraordinary but stretched: financial counsellors do beautiful work with tiny resources; palliative-care social workers do their best with the time they have; hospital hardship desks vary widely. What has never existed is a service dedicated to this specific intersection — serious illness and consumer debt, on the person's side of the table, from intake through to resolution. We think that gap is worth filling now because the regulatory environment (hardship rules, ASIC guidance, ACCC scrutiny of BNPL) finally makes competent advocacy in this space genuinely effective — and because the palliative-care system's national workforce is now organised enough that a proper referral pathway is buildable.
Life Without Debt Ltd is the charity — a proposed Australian public benevolent institution that raises funds and refers eligible beneficiaries into casework. Life Without Debt Ltd is not itself credit-licensed. All debt-mediation work is performed by our related-party service provider, Credit Mediation Services Pty Ltd, which holds Australian Credit Licence no. 387398. CMS's licensed practitioners take each case, contact creditors directly on the beneficiary's behalf, and carry out the mediation under the National Consumer Credit Protection Act framework. LWD funds this work under a formal related-party service agreement. This structure is deliberate: it keeps the charity focused on funding and eligibility while placing the regulated credit activity where the credit licence sits. Individual outcomes vary and depend on creditor cooperation — mediation is not debt discharge.
The founder's story on this page will be authored in Laurence's own words at CMO sight-check (HA3), not by the agent. Placeholder: this section will describe, in 200-300 words, the personal path and professional experience that led Laurence to found LWD — including any lived experience or family experience of illness and consumer debt, where Laurence chooses to share it. Where lived experience is shared, it will be Laurence's own; where family experience is shared, it will be with the informed consent of the family members concerned.
The board is small at present. Current directors are listed at /board-and-governance. Recruitment for additional board seats is underway; we are looking for skills across finance, law, palliative care, lived experience of serious illness, and technology. Board recruitment is an agenda item at the 25 August 2026 Board Meeting.
If you are living with a terminal, life-limiting, chronic or serious illness in Australia and you are carrying consumer debt — please write to us. If you are caring for someone in that circumstance — we can help you too. If you are a clinician wondering whether we can help one of your patients — please refer them. If you want to help us do this work — there are several ways. If you are a journalist writing about this space — we are ready.
Correspondence with us is protected under our Privacy Policy. Concerns about our conduct can be raised via /complaints. Complete governance documentation is at /governance-documents.
Version 0.1 · HA1 draft · Sprint 37. Related: How LWD can help · Board & Governance · Awareness hub.