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In Australia, the government helps people with a wide range of payments.
For example, older people, families, people with disabilities, carers, students and people
looking for work.
Many people get assistance at some time in their lives.
Generally, payments are made once every two weeks, so it’s very important to budget
to make your money last.
The money is to help pay for things like rent, food, electricity, transport and anything
else you need during the two weeks.
The best way to make your money last until your next payment is to plan how you will
pay for all your expenses like rent, bills and food.
If you receive Centrelink payments, you can use a free service called Centrepay to help
you pay for some of your bills.
Centrepay takes some of the money from your payment to pay your bills so that you don’t
have to do this. You can choose the amount of money you would like taken out of your
payments to pay your bills.
Centrelink will send this money to the organisation you want to pay.
There are many types of bills you can pay using Centrepay, such as: rent, electricity,
gas, water, child care or even for your phone bills.
This helps because you can be sure you have paid the bills, and you know how much money
you have left for other things like food.
This is “Amir” and “Jasmine”. Amir is a job seeker who gets a payment called
Newstart Allowance while he is looking for work.
They use Centrepay to pay their electricity bills and rent. It means they don’t have
to worry about these bills.
It’s important that you tell us about changes in your life.
This includes things like your: contact details, relationship status, work status, and bank details.