MACON, Ga. — Debt impacts millions of people each year, especially credit card debt and even medical debt. Imagine waking up knowing some of your debt is getting paid off.
One church in Macon made some folk's dreams come true.
"I have a younger brother with a chronic illness, and he's had it since he was about nine years old," says Payton Stone, Associate Pastor at Mulberry United Methodist Church.
Stone saw his parents deal with medical bills and knows how it impacts others. Even though his parents were able to pay it off, he knows how much others still struggle to pay off debt.
"I know that it can be an oppressive thing in one's life," says Stone.
Senior pastor Ted Goshorn says the church wanted to raise money to help people in the community. They partnered with RIP Medical Debt, a company that buys debt in bundles of millions of dollars at a time at a fraction of the original cost.
The next step for the church was to raise money.
"We set a goal for the church to raise $12,000, believing that would pay off about $1 million in debt," says Goshorn.
They ended up raising $15,000 and turned to RIP Medical Debt.
"They went to the debt marketplace. Used our funds to purchase debt on that market place and the total amount of debt they were able to purchase was $1,128,641."
They ended up helping out individuals with debt from across the state of Georgia, including Fulton, Cobb and Clayton counties.
Closer to home, they helped folks in Bibb, Houston, Baldwin, and Wilkinson counties, to name a few. In Bibb, they threw out over $11,000 in debt. In Houston, they abolished a little over $4,000, and in Baldwin, nearly $95,000 of debt was taken care of.
It was a blessing for people no longer facing payments and calls from bill debt collection agencies.