I disagree with “knock out the medical bill”. We have med bills and pay between $10-$20 per month interest free on them. It has no effect on our credit and they give us zero grief.
As I understand it, as long as you make payments towards the hospital bill they can’t chase you down for it. I’d go that route rather than pay off the whole thing at once, since you might need that money for something catastrophic (loss of a job or something similar) where missed mortgage/rent payments would be a lot more significant than a small unpaid hospital bill.
Years ago we paid medical bills in small incremental payments, but now you can negotiate a bill, sometimes to half of what your owe.
I wouldn’t do it over the phone, I’d take cash in hand and walk into the payment office and say if we can settle this bill right now for “x” amount of dollars, I have the cash with me. If the billing office is in a different city (which some are) then you’ll have to do it over the phone.
An insurance company pays the hospital a huge reduction in their actual bill. Sometimes the bill is reduced by 80 percent. The hospital is willing to deal, especially if you’re holding cash in hand and it’s settled at that time (saves them labor costs and the uncertainty of whether they will be paid or not.) Just make sure you get it in writing that the amount you’re paying satisfies your debt.
Dave Ramsey lives in some kind of fantasy world when it comes to investing money , he’s great at killing debt but he STILL seems to thing that growth mutual funds average 8-12% growth and that the markets aren’t screwed, when they are so divorced from reality as to be laughable ... He also enjoys disparaging people that see gold as a wealth store... he encourages people to sell theirs off and uses the false argument that it “isn’t money” “can’t spend it at the Hess station, but they sure take those crummy paper dollars” ...
Live like no one else so that later you can LIVE like no one else PING!
Step one is to call the hospital and say you want to arrange a payment plan, because most of the time they’ll knock half off the bill right then. And they won’t charge interest either, so might as well work a plan, time value of money is on your side when there’s no interest.
The problem with dragging it out with payments is then you MUST make those payments every month. Get it over with, pay it off now if you can, then you’re not stuck with the past making ongoing demands on your future.