Dealing with your finances can be a lot, we get it. These days it seems like there’s a calculator for everything, and many people end up feeling like they should have just gotten an MBA in accounting than having to deal with all the pieces of their financial life. Still, these calculators can help give you an idea of what rates you qualify for, especially if you have your credit score checked by a service like Credit Karma before you start applying. This will help give you the knowledge base you need to determine which loans and payment options are going to work best for you.

These are the calculators you really need to work out your current financial and credit situation, so you can advocate for yourself in getting the best possible medical loans and refinance rates:

• Insurance calculator
• Loan calculators
• Personal loan calculator
• Refinance calculator
• Savings calculator

Some of these obviously won’t apply to every situation. If you have all these things, odds are your financial advisors can tell you with a single phone call where you stand and their advice on how best to proceed. If you don’t own your home or have student loans, refinance rates and mortgage lenders probably aren’t a concern to you. If you don’t pay renters’ insurance or have a vehicle, odds are you’re not sweating how much of a bite your insurance is taking out of your household finances. If you’re not currently servicing any loans, your APRs aren’t a consideration.

Whether your credit score is 300, 660, or over 700, everyone’s financial picture is a little different, so a loan that has better terms for you may not be acceptable for other borrowers, even though on paper your financial situations are identical. You know the amounts of your bills, what living expenses you have to cover throughout the month, and what is leftover from your paycheck so you avoid running out of money in the bank better than anyone. Even so, insurance deductibles and expensive fees from certain unexpected health care costs and expenses like emergency medicine cannot be planned for, and when they appear they can certainly impact your financial outlook for months or even years to come.

United Medical Credit is based in California. Because of this, we’re subject to California privacy laws, disclosure and truth in advertising statutes. In 2022, these updated state law standards are the strictest in the nation and carry steep legal penalties for violations, including potential compensation to affected customers in the event of a security breach. Every one of the licensed lending companies that we take on as a partner is subject to these same rules and laws, and we don’t accept partner companies that can’t demonstrate enough experience in unsecured personal loan provision or capability to meet our stringent customer service standards.

United Medical Credit is a brokerage, meaning when you submit your prequalified application to prequalify with United Medical Credit, we make the application available on your behalf to our medical lending partners using our secure in-house platform backed by industry-leading crypto methodology and security protocols.

Each company individually considers whether to accept your application based on the results of a credit query, your FICO credit score number, and other information and from there whether to make you an offer. This gives you the ability to comparison shop and see which offer has the right mix of term length, annual percentage interest rate, and payoff for your needs.

We can’t guarantee the creditworthiness of any given applicant, or that even with multiple signers acknowledging responsibility for the loan, our lender network will accept any given application.

 To avoid rejection and maximize your chances of receiving the medical loans you need, United Medical Credit suggests all applicants consider the following points:

1. Check your FICO credit score through the major credit bureaus and Credit Karma before you get started. Be sure to challenge any incorrect or expired notations, as well as any debts you do not recall incurring, since these can adversely impact your credit score and your chances of getting a loan.
2. Make sure your application is filled out as completely and honestly as possible. Missing, contradictory, misleading or simply not enough information can make it harder, or even impossible, for our lenders to process and evaluate your application.
3. If you have several signers or a cosigner who should be named on the loan documents, make sure their names are noted as soon as possible to prevent delays in processing.
4. If you recently took steps to consolidate your debt (within the past three years especially) or if you’ve had a bankruptcy, make sure that’s listed upfront so you don’t have to worry about it coming back to haunt you later.
5. Don’t apply for a bigger loan than you need. If you’re on Medicare, for example, and it will pay 70% of a $50,000 surgery, you should probably only apply for a $20,000-25,000 loan, which should be enough to cover the extra expenses, medications, and so forth associated with your care and recovery. Be honest with yourself about your financial needs and your present and projected future situation so you don’t end up biting off more than you can chew.
6. Always plan for the worst-case scenario. If you’re making $150,000 a year now and you lose your job in three months, mortgages, homeowners insurance, and other similar bills won’t wait.

By following this methodology, you can help make sure you’ve positioned yourself to cover the original loan and set yourself up for financial success and a higher credit score down the line. In addition, following these steps and taking these points into account can help make your application more attractive to lenders, increasing the likelihood of having more lenders vying for your business and putting you in a better negotiating position!

One-way health care insurance companies keep their costs down is by denying claims for treatments and procedures, even if on paper the procedure should be covered and you’ve already paid the deductibles, passing the medical bills and health care costs on to you, the insured. Generally speaking, it is legal for them to do so, although depending on how the policy is written and the details of the clauses the carrier put in before you signed it, you might be able to get an attorney to help them see the error of their ways. Of course, that’s a long-term solution that probably won’t be easy and may or may not pan out for you, and hospitals and healthcare providers prefer to be paid promptly—and they’re not sending the bills and collection calls to your insurance company, but to your house and place of work!

While we can’t guarantee our partners will choose to fund all applicants, United Medical Credit and our partner network of healthcare financing lenders pride ourselves on the fact applicants pay no fees to apply, get prequalified or accept competitive interest personal loans. None of our partner lenders charges a closing or origination fee. When our partner lenders issue an offer, they include an easy-to-understand disclosure that clearly spells out the loan repayment term, the APR, and other information you need to choose the right installment loan for you or negotiate for more favorable terms, although most loans our lenders offer have interest rates that are on average competitive with other market products and some of their products’ interest rate beat program guidelines from most banks and the US government. Some lenders and certain categories of higher-dollar loans might require some form of collateral, also known as secured loans, but generally, this does not apply as most loans our lender network offers are unsecured personal loans, also called “signature loans.” And because you’re prequalified immediately, you could be approved for a loan as soon as the next business day after you apply.

In some cases, applying for medical credit cards might make sense. Some of the reasons people generally give for getting a healthcare credit card include paying for the bill associated with medical expenses related to things like IVF, egg transfer, and fertility treatments; managing an existing but well-controlled condition while having a little more of a cushion in the estimated household finances; helping to offset expensive treatments with a single monthly payment, or treating it as an investment and getting a bump in one’s credit rating by consistently paying overtime. None of these are a bad reason and depending on your actual financial situation, a medical credit card may help give you peace of mind if anything should happen that your health insurance plan won’t cover.

However, there are some pitfalls you should be aware of too. Missing just one payment can adversely affect your credit score and undo all the progress you’ve already made. Even the best medical credit cards often have a high-interest rate attached to them, although some companies sometimes hide this among the fine print of their advertiser disclosure statements, or entice borrowers to ignore how much they’re likely to pay by offering a featured zero percent introductory APR for six, twelve or 24 months on approved credit. The catch is, if you don’t pay the entire amount by the time the introductory rate expires, you could get whacked with a 20-30% APR on the entire balance later, even if you were just a few payments away from being in the clear.

Another factor that few people seem to know about medical credit cards is that, unlike conventional credit cards that can be used for almost any purpose, they’re very limited in what you can and cannot use them for. Some card issuers may allow you to use your medical credit card for dental financing up to a certain amount—but if your card won’t even cover the cost of your yearly checkup and cleaning, you’ll have to find another way to pay the difference. Some cards can be used for emergency hospital care, but not for routine healthcare, or vice versa, which means they may be completely useless at the time you most need them. Still, others require you to purchase X amount of permitted goods and services over a given time period to continue to qualify for the card; if you don’t buy, the card goes bye-bye!

This doesn’t mean that having a medical credit card is a bad idea if your financial situation allows it. After all, having access to more ways to deal with the costs of unexpected or emergency medical care is not a bad thing for anyone, especially these days. However, if you want to get a medical credit card, we recommend you take a look at this article from the pros on the editorial team at NerdWallet featuring comprehensive reviews and ratings of the best credit cards for healthcare costs in 2022, broken down by respective category, rewards, ease of use and terms and limitations, so you can select the right card for your and your family’s needs.

And if that medical credit card doesn’t get you where you want to be, or you find out it won’t pay for something that you were sure it would, then United Medical Credit is here to help you access the cash you need to finance your medical care—fast!