Andrew Henderson: 
Welcome, Rachel, and thanks for joining us here today. Really excited to talk about the partnership between Aged Care Gurus and Aged Care Decisions. 

For context, for those watching, my name is Andrew Henderson. I’m the Co-Founder and CEO of Aged Care Decisions. 

More importantly, you’re the Principal of Aged Care Gurus, an organisation which broadly helps people through the maze of financial decisions in the aged care sector. 

Rachel Lane: 
Yeah, that’s it. That’s our passion. Our passion is to demystify what things are going to cost, what the impact will be on their pension, whether or not they’re eligible for rent assistance, their contributions towards Support at Home, residential aged care — the numbers to it. 

Andrew Henderson: 
Yeah. And I thought it’d be important to share with you because I’m actually keen to hear your story. 

When we started Aged Care Decisions, Ken, my business partner, and I had two very separate, very independent experiences in the aged care sector, but both impacted our families quite deeply. We knew each other at the time, of course, and we came together and said, surely there must be something we could do to make the journey in aged care less stressful and a little bit easier for families going through that decision. 

That’s sort of what gave birth to Aged Care Decisions for us. 

I’m keen to hear how you arrived in the sector and why you do what you do. 

Rachel Lane: 
Oh goodness. I arrived in the sector 22 years ago as a very young financial planner and fell into this space around retirement living and aged care. 

I think the reason I loved it so much, and loved the clients so much, was because I’d grown up with my grandmother. I just loved the clients, and they loved me. It was something that drove me to still work in the sector 22 years later. 

Andrew Henderson: 
And you would have seen it change a lot over that time. 

Rachel Lane: 
It has. Unfortunately, the complexity has gotten worse, I think, over that period of time. 

That’s really what we’re passionate about — making sure that before people sign on the dotted line, they understand what it’s going to cost them. 

Andrew Henderson: 
Just from the perspective of what Aged Care Decisions does, we help thousands of families every single month. The main thing we focus on is helping them understand the decisions they’re going to have to make and ultimately driving towards making sure we help them find a provider or a home that they love. 

The one thing we don’t do a lot of work in, because it’s not our area of expertise, is the financial side and some of those financial decisions and considerations that they have to think about. 

So, I’m keen to hear a little bit more about your organisation and, in particular, what sort of help you can provide and what some of the fears and concerns are that people present with. 

Rachel Lane: 
Yeah. This is why we’re so excited about this partnership. 

We really want people to be well-informed about these decisions. We have the Village Guru software, where people can get a Village Guru report about Support at Home, retirement villages, land lease communities and residential aged care. 

It crunches the numbers, so it will tell them what it’s going to cost in ongoing outgoings, and it provides them with an estimate of their age pension and rent assistance payments, and also their contributions, whether that’s Support at Home or residential aged care. 

We also have a fantastic national network of financial advisers who specialise in retirement living and aged care, and they can provide really great advice to those customers who need it. 

Andrew Henderson: 
Do you find there’s a big difference between a family that prepares up front versus those who are almost forced to do it last minute? And what does that preparation look like? 

Rachel Lane: 
Oh, huge difference. 

I guess the most common question that people come to me with is, “Should I sell my house or keep my house?” 

There’s not really a simple answer to that. You need to understand how it’s going to impact your contributions. 

Normally, this question is asked if they’re moving into residential aged care, but sometimes it’s being asked in relation to Support at Home because they’re downsizing to get access to their Support at Home and private care services as a top-up. 

That question has so many mechanisms. You can keep your house and have an exemption applied to it for pension, but if you keep your house, it’s assessed up to a capped value for residential aged care. There are lots of moving parts. 

That’s probably the most common question we hear when it comes to finances. 

But now with Support at Home, and even to a lesser extent residential aged care, because it is so tightly linked to age pension means testing, we find that these decisions really do turn multiple wheels. 

When you’re doing something that can improve your pension, you are doing something, as a general rule, that will reduce your Support at Home or your residential aged care contributions. 

Andrew Henderson: 
The amount of assistance that you can provide families — as I said, I know what we do, but just hearing the complexity of what you’re talking about, families really do need to get that help, don’t they? 

Rachel Lane: 
They do. 

I guess that’s one of the reasons why, with the Village Guru reports, we try to set that information out really simply, and we try to make it as informative as we can. 

Ultimately, even if they’re going to go and speak to Centrelink, their accountant, their financial adviser or their lawyer, we want them to have that understanding of what it is that they’re contemplating doing and what that’s likely to cost them before they start going down the road of making big decisions, like whether to keep or sell the family home. 

Andrew Henderson: 
As you said, signing on the bottom line. 

Rachel Lane: 
Yeah. You’d be amazed at how many people sign on the dotted line before they know the cost. It’s truly frightening to me. 

Andrew Henderson: 
One thing we’re particularly excited about — and you talked about your unique software — is the adaptation we’ve done for the Support at Home co-contribution calculator. 

Rachel Lane: 
Yeah, a long name for a really important tool. 

Andrew Henderson: 
We’ve been able to adapt that together, so thank you for accommodating our clients. 

For our viewers’ sake, the way that’s going to work is once they connect with the aged care specialists and we go through finding out their care needs, preferences and some of their budget requirements, that gives us a better picture. 

The software we’ve developed is then going to be able to give them an estimate on their contribution. Fortunately for them, we’ve just called it the Home Care Report, so they don’t have to remember that it’s a Support at Home co-contribution calculator. 

Rachel Lane: 
It’s a far better name. 

Andrew Henderson: 
We see this advantage on three fronts. 

Number one, it’s free for families. Together, we’re making this available free for families. That’s always been very important for Ken and I when we started Aged Care Decisions — that the help is available to anyone, regardless of their means. 

Number two, talking about the preparation side of things, it does allow people to forward plan because it’s an estimate. It’s not to the dollar, but it gives them the thought of, “What am I going to have to think about as I go into this?” 

The third, and I think a really important one, is that it stops families being blindsided last minute by costs they weren’t prepared for. 

Do you find that happening? 

Rachel Lane: 
Absolutely. They get sticker shock when they get the price. Their initial knee-jerk reaction is to stop the services, and of course, that’s the worst thing. 

But it can be very difficult because of the complexity of the means testing. It can be very difficult to estimate those costs. 

There’s such a wide range. You’re talking about between 5% and 50% on your independent services, and between 17.5% and 80%. Naturally, people go, “Am I at the 17.5% end or the 80% end?” because that’s a very wide range. 

Andrew Henderson: 
We’ve had families, as you exactly said, pause or stop their services altogether because they’ve gone in and said, “My friend was a classification four, I’m a classification four, so I thought I’d just be paying what they’re paying.” 

As you said, it depends on the type of services you’re going to get. It’s means tested and there’s a whole raft of other things. 

I think that ability for them to plan ahead is really important. We’re really excited about providing that tool — the Home Care Report. 

I know we’re a little bit limited on time, but I did want to talk about two hot topics in each of these sectors — residential care and home care. 

Firstly, residential aged care. As a backdrop to it all, it’s a difficult area to navigate at the moment. I’m not sure if you’re seeing it with your clients, but the difficulty in finding a bed is becoming more and more of an issue. 

In terms of where we’re headed in the next five years, we’ve got hundreds of beds being added per year, but thousands of beds being required per year. An average home takes about five years to build, so we’ve got a problem ahead of us. 

Rachel Lane: 
There are 80,000 people turning 80 every year for the next decade. 

Andrew Henderson: 
Right. 

Rachel Lane: 
The government announced in the budget this year, I think, funding for an extra 5,000 residential aged care beds every year, but we need about 10,000. 

Andrew Henderson: 
At least we’re seeing the government’s push and support for people to stay at home longer. That’s a desire for most people — they want to stay at home — but sometimes it’s just not possible. 

So we do have a difficult time ahead for families that need residential aged care. 

Then, on the home care front, November 2025 rolled around, and lots of changes came about. I was a little relieved it wasn’t 1 July, to be honest, because 1 July is my birthday and they always make these monumental changes on the 1st of July. At least last year on my birthday, I got to go out for lunch. 

Rachel Lane: 
I think the entire sector was relieved that it wasn’t 1 July. 

Andrew Henderson: 
What are some of the observations you’ve had since the changes, whether it be home care or residential aged care, but more specifically on the home care or Support at Home front? 

Rachel Lane: 
To be honest, under the old world, a lot of people didn’t pay very much, if anything at all, towards home care. There was a basic daily fee that was often waived, and the income-tested care fee that sat on top often didn’t get triggered. You could earn a lot of income before you were paying too much. 

When it comes to home care, we’ve really gone from this scenario where people are paying very little, if anything, to some pretty high co-contributions. 

In fact, particularly in the everyday living bucket, where people are paying for gardening and things of that nature, and they’ve got, say, self-funded retirees paying a contribution at 80%, you’ve really got to wonder: is it worth buying those services through your Support at Home package, or are you going to get a better deal just buying it privately? 

Andrew Henderson: 
We see many families asking the exact same question, and that’s not an unreasonable question at all. 

Rachel Lane: 
I think there really is a shift around how people think about Support at Home, which services they want to access through their Support at Home package, and which ones they don’t. 

Using that self-funded retiree example again, accessing Support at Home to pay for physiotherapy might make a lot more sense than using your private health insurance, where you’ve still got a gap. Physio is covered under clinical care through Support at Home. 

It really is about getting in touch with specialists who can help you work out what the funding is, what the fees are, and what the smartest way is to structure this so that you get the care you need, but you’re paying for it in the smartest way you can. 

Andrew Henderson: 
Just in that answer, I’m sure many people realise, number one, how complicated it is because there are so many machinations to this. But also, number two, the expertise that you can bring to the table to help families make the right decisions, or at least apply the right thinking to their decisions. 

Rachel Lane: 
I think the thing that sometimes gets lost is that this is someone who is navigating the system for the first time. We’ve been doing this for years, and sometimes it can seem complex even to us. I can only imagine how complicated it is when this is not something that you live and breathe every day. 

Andrew Henderson: 
We say to our clients all the time, because even talking with friends and friends of friends, they ask about Aged Care Decisions and say, “Who are your clientele?” 

I say there is no way to describe the clientele. Whether they’re from a white-collar profession, blue-collar profession, stay-at-home background, it does not matter. It’s equally as complicated for everyone simply because it’s the first time, or maybe only the second time, they’ve done it in their lives. 

Rachel Lane: 
I’ll tell you who our biggest demographic is. We refer to her as TED — the trusted eldest daughter. She has to navigate everything from finding the right aged care home to how the numbers work. 

I think this is the TED service. 

Andrew Henderson: 
That’s an interesting name for it. 

I’m sure we could talk for hours about aged care, but I really do appreciate you coming along today and talking about the partnership in general. 

I want to assure everyone who works with Aged Care Decisions that we’re here to help you. There are also other organisations in the market, such as Aged Care Gurus, where you can access assistance depending on the help you need, and connect with one of us depending on your need. 

Certainly, if you come to Aged Care Decisions, you can find more information about fees and finances via our website. There’s a link to our hub, and inevitably, we’ll help you navigate back to Aged Care Gurus if you need more intensive support on the finance side of things. 

Rachel, thanks so much for your time today. 

Rachel Lane: 
Thanks.