Dental payment plans: Direct dentist-to-patient financing.
You may find that your dentist has a policy where they will enter into a dental payment plan agreement with their patients directly (no third party involved). However, with the influx of finance companies that have chosen to participate in the dental credit arena, finding a dentist that will do so is becoming less and less common.
Passing patient financing on to a third party may not be as profitable for the dentist. But doing so may be a better choice for them when compared to the potential risks and headaches they may run into if running a dental payment plan in-house on their own.
Working out a budget plan with your dentist.
The terms of some of the in-house financing plans that a dentist will offer may not differ substantially from some of the third-party dental credit programs that we discuss elsewhere on our site. This might be most expected in those situations where the credit or loan is being extended by a multi-office, multi-practitioner dental service provider who regularly makes these types of arrangements and has a dedicated staff that oversees the administration of these plans.
Individual dentists may choose to offer these types of programs too. But many may simply find that doing so is too overwhelming and troublesome for it to be worth their effort.
Some dentists will still do payment plans the old fashion way.
It is possible that you may stumble upon a dentist who will, more akin of the types of dental payment plans that existed in decades past, offer an interest-free payment plan to patients directly. At least a part of their motivation for doing so could be assumed to be simply that of taking care of their patients and creating good will.
You have to assume that this type of arrangement is only offered to patients with whom the dentist has had a long-standing patient-doctor relationship and whose payment history has shown credit worthiness.
With this type of payment plan, the dentist will usually ask for some portion of the dental treatment's total cost to be paid up front as a down payment. Typically this amount will be between one third and one half of the patient's total treatment expense (there might be some adjustment made to these numbers if the patient has dental insurance coverage). The idea is that the down payment will cover a significant portion of those fixed expenses associated with providing the patient's treatment (laboratory bill, office overhead expenses, staff salaries).
The remainder is then budgeted out in monthly payments. Especially in those cases where no interest is being charged, you would have to expect that the repayment time frame that is offered would be limited to just several months, or possibly a year.
