Get the best of both worlds with combination plan management

How you manage your National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) funding is a personal choice based on what works best for you and your situation.

Some people want to manage their plan funding entirely on their own while others prefer to have the admin taken care of through plan management.

While there are a few different ways to manage your NDIS plan, one option you may not know about is combination management. Combination is essentially accessing the great features of plan management while also self-managing the parts of your plan you want to have more control of.

In case you didn’t already know, there are 4 ways to manage your NDIS plan; agency managed, self-managed, plan managed and combination. We have more information on the first three options here. Let’s take a look at combination management and how it might work for you.

What is combination plan management?

When you set up your NDIS plan, you can choose how you would like to manage your funding. With a combination style of management, you can use a different management style for different budget categories or parts of budget categories. For example, there may be some specific budget categories you want to manage yourself, so you could choose to self-manage those specific categories. But as self-management is quite a lot of work, you may choose to have the rest of your plan managed by a plan manager, to reduce the amount of time and effort you spend on self-management.

What’s the benefit?

• You can access more providers if part of your plan is plan managed or self-managed
• You can choose which budget categories you want more control and flexibility over
• You can try out different plan management styles to see what works best for you.

Depending on your personal circumstances, it might be easier to have your plan with one management style, but for some people the ease of choosing which budget categories they want more control over can make all the difference.

For example, the flexibility of having different budget categories means you could have your Consumables budget self-managed, so you have the flexibility to personally make claims through the NDIS portal. At the same time, you could have the rest of your budget categories plan managed so you don’t have to do the admin for your whole plan.

How to get combination management

Getting combination management in your plan is easy! You just need to ask your NDIS planner or Local Area Coordinator (LAC) at your planning meeting or review meeting that you would like to use a combination of funding management types for your plan. You then need to choose the type for each support budget category or part of a budget category. If you elect to have any of the budget categories plan managed your planner will allocate funding to pay for your plan manager.

During COVID-19 the NDIS has become more flexible with ‘management only’ changes to your current plan without the need for a full plan review. If you would like to make changes to how your plan is currently managed you will need to reach out to your Early Childhood Early Intervention Coordinator, LAC or National Disability Insurance Scheme Planner or call the NDIS directly on 1800 800 110 and select option 5 to discuss your personal circumstances.

If you're interested in finding out more about combination management, contact us by phone or email to chat about how My Plan Manager can help make your life easier by managing all or part of your plan.