A YourLifeChoices reader wants to know if combining two blocks will change her eligibility for the Age Pension under the assets test.
Q. Marianne
We are thinking of buying a property that has a house on one block of 2800 square metres and attached is another block on a separate title of 2900sqm. We want to change things so that we have one big block, that is, add the second block of land onto the title that the house is on. Will this come under the assets test?
•••
A. The Centrelink rules for owning land are very strict, but Marianne will probably pass the assets test for this amount of land.
Your eligibility for the Age Pension is based on two tests, the income test and the assets test. As far as Centrelink is concerned, the assets test encompasses things such as financial assets, home contents, vehicles, real estate and superannuation pensions. But the item we are most interested in for this question is the real estate.
Under Centrelink rules, only two hectares of land on the same title of your home are exempt from the assets test.
Given the size of the blocks quoted above, they would easily come under that limit.
However, Marianne must combine the two blocks on one title before she applies for the pension, otherwise the block without the house will be considered an asset.
For more information on the assets test, read here.
There are exceptions to this two-hectare rule for rural customers of Centrelink. Read about them here.
Have you had your land evaluated for Centrelink purposes? Why not share your experience in the comments section below?
Also read: Centrelink Q&A: Can you claim the Age Pension and the Carer Allowance?
No matter what you do Centrelink will most likely get it wrong. The government should authorize a lot more training for their employees. It would save a lot of wages doing reviews of poor decisions made by Centrelink staff. We recently had a pension application rejected as they claimed we had combined assets of well over $2,000,000. (rubbish) I requested a review. This was done and we never heard the outcome but by phone it looked like they were still going to reject the application. I went online and requested another review, got sick of waiting so put in another fresh application. A lady rang me one day asking for more proof of having lived where we said we had lived for over 20 years as it was a farm. We supplied the additional information and were notified on a Sunday by voice mail that I will get the pension backdated to when my original application was lodged. I think with better training of personnel the wages of at least four people could have been saved. Instead of cutting personnel better training of personnel would cut the need to work Sunday!