Could a personal loan be your ticket to paying off your medical debt?

This may be a good way to get those bills under control.

Key points

• Medical debt is forcing Americans to make drastic changes in the way they spend and save.
• If you’re juggling medical bills, it pays to consider consolidating that debt with a personal loan.

Health care can be expensive, even if you have health insurance. Between premiums, copayments, deductibles, and uncovered services, it’s pretty easy to incur medical debt if you get sick or injured unexpectedly.

Today, medical debt forces people to make difficult choices. In a recent investigation by Discover, medical debt forced 32% of Americans to put retirement savings on hold and forced 36% to delay adding money to their emergency fund. And it also causes 27% of Americans to stop paying other bills.

If you have medical debt, you may be struggling to keep up with your various payments. And in this regard, a Personal loan could help.

The advantages of a personal loan

A personal loan allows you to borrow a sum of money for any reason. You can take out a personal loan and use the proceeds to renovate your home, repair your car, or consolidate your credit card balances. Likewise, you can use a personal loan to consolidate your medical bills and make them easier to pay off.

Let’s say you are currently paying seven different health care bills, each with its own due date. Juggling those payments and remembering when bills are due can be difficult, especially when you have other things in life to focus on. The advantage of getting a personal loan is that you only have one payment to make each month. And because personal loans come with fixed interest rates, your payments will be predictable.

Meanwhile, personal loans tend to come with competitive interest rates. Admittedly, these days, consumer borrowing rates are on the rise across the board due to recent moves by the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates. But if you have a good credit rating, you could get a competitive interest rate on a personal loan, making your payments reasonably affordable.

Don’t let medical debt affect your life

You may need to put certain goals on hold, like saving a down payment for a house, while you work to pay off your medical debt. But one thing you don’t want to do is fall behind on that debt because it could hurt your credit score and lead to a world of trouble.

If you take out a personal loan and use it to pay your medical bills, then you’ll be left with just one monthly payment to work into your budget. And it could help alleviate stress at a time when you’re also trying to recover from an injury or illness that has led to you racking up medical debt.

That said, before taking out a personal loan to pay off your medical debt, contact your providers and see if it’s possible to negotiate that debt down. Some may be willing to work with you. But once you have what you think are your final numbers, it’s worth seeing if a personal loan makes managing your healthcare debt easier.