Understanding Your NDIS Consumables Budget

Your consumables budget falls under ‘Core Supports’. It’s the one budget area that is both the most flexible and the most challenging to manage effectively. It’s also the area that causes the most confusion. 

What’s covered ?

The budget covers all of those everyday items required to help with your every day disability related needs. Any item up to $1,500 can come from this budget, it would generally be used for all of those lower cost consumable items.Items such as pads, special pillows, modified eating utensils, labour services are all examples of items that could come out of this budget. 

Where the flexibility comes in is that you can choose how you want to spend this budget, as long as it’s reasonable, necessary and inline with your plan goals.

You can purchase items first from pretty much anywhere. If you have a plan manager, they can pay providers on your behalf without the need for a quote.This can allow for some cost savings to help stretch this budget as far as possible; for example, if you are needing to purchase nappies, you have the flexibility of buying in bulk to save some money.

Why is it challenging to manage?

Without careful budgeting and management, you can tend to quickly run out of money before the end of your plan. This is a quite common occurrence as small items bought here and there might seem insignificant at the time, but they can add up quickly over the course of a few months, resulting in running out of money in the budget well before your plan is due to renew.

If most of the items are recurrent or regular purchases, it can be a good idea to break the $1,500 up into three month blocks, or even one month blocks, and then track your expenditure with a spreadsheet and review it at the end of every month.

Alternatively,  a good plan manager will do all that for you and send you reports so that you can see at a glance how your spending is tracking. Some plan managers also have online portal for you to log into so that you can see how it’s tracking.

If you’d like to learn more about plan management, and how we can help you manage your budget, please feel free to get in contact with us here and organise your free 15 minute consultation.