‘It is expensive to be poor’: 28-year-old Aussie’s pension experiment reveals grim reality
News.com.au
December 23, 2025
A Melbourne woman who tried living on the amount of money she would get weekly if she were on the age pension has found it unlivable and bad for her health.
Zoe Heacock was shocked when she read that Aussies living in capital cities on the current age or disability pension only have $8 left a day after paying rent.
The $8 figure came from a report by Everybody’s Home, a housing affordability campaign that claims once you factor in the average rent in capital cities in Australia, that is what people on the Age Pension and Disability Support Pension would be left with after covering rent.
Ms Heacock told news.com.au she couldn’t get that $8 figure out of her head because it was so confronting.
“I thought it was an absolutely crazy number,” she said.
Ms Heacock told news.com.au she couldn’t get that $8 figure out of her head.
She said being left with $8 a day to live on is just ‘crazy’.
The most a single person on the age person can get in a fortnight from government payments is $1178.70, less than $600 a week.
This is the same amount single people get on the disability support pension. It works out to be just over $80 a day.
Ms Heacock was so struck by the report she decided to try living on $8 day as part of Aussie athlete Nedd Brockman’s 2025 Uncomfortable Challenge.
It encourages people to raise money to address homelessness in Australia by pledging to do something that makes them feel uncomfortable for 10 days.
Ms Heacock said that the $8 figure really stood out to her because she thought immediately, “I don’t think I could do it”, but she wanted to try.
She believes the small amount shows the “misalignment between the welfare system and the housing crisis” and argued that payments aren’t keeping up with inflated living costs.
“Welfare payments haven’t increased at the same rate as rents have,” she said.
A departmental spokesperson for the Department of Social Services told news.com.au that increased social security payments are one of the ways the government is supporting Australians amid the cost of living crisis.
“The Australian Government is supporting people with disability and older Australians with cost of living in a number of ways across government, including increased social security payments,” the spokesperson said.
“Since 2022, the full single rate of Age Pension and Disability Support Pension have increased by almost $5000 a year and the maximum rate of Commonwealth Rent Assistance has increased by almost 50 per cent.”
The Age Pension rates are also indexed twice a year in a bid to reflect the changes in the cost of living for pensioners.
The 28-year-old argued that welfare payments haven’t kept up with the rising costs of rents.
She tried living-off just $8 a day after paying rent for 10 days.
‘Expensive to be poor’
Very quickly after Ms Heacock began her experiment, she realised that living on just $8 was going to be more than difficult.
“One thing that really shocked me was that I was going to work every day in the city and on public transport, and the trams were $5.50 one-way, and that is standard,” she said.
“$11 a day on public transport, if I were just paying for public transport, that meant I’d be over my budget.”
In Victoria, concession holders get 50 per cent off their fares, so someone on the pension would likely be paying half of that $11 figure.
Even if they only spent $5.50 a day on transport, that is more than half of their $8 budget.
Ms Heacock was taking her 10-day experiment seriously, so to save money she started getting the tram to work and not tapping on to avoid the fees.
“I started fare evading and, on the second day, a tram inspector picked me up, and I just said ‘sorry I forgot to tap on’, and then they got me to top-up my card in front of them, and I topped up to $20,” she said.
That $20 avoided her getting a fine, but she pointed out that someone on Centrelink might not have the means to be able to just put $20 towards public transport and then got fined.
“You just think about all the additional expenses that poor people face because they’re trying to avoid expenses,” she said.
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It Is Expensive To Be Poor Experiment Reveals (Read 124 times)
