Thousands of bad outbound links

SO….

I’ve been running a tool that looks for bad *outbound* links from my blog. I have almos 10K posts from 7 years worth of blogging.

As you might expect there are about 4,000 bad outbound links. Some of them are sloppy mistakes, but most are just things that have expired for reasons out of my control.

Even with this tool to help, it’ll be insanely time consuming to go through all those old links and try to correct them. I can just “unlink them” automatically but many of them will then look weird if they say something like “click here” and there’s nothing to click on!

So…

1) Does this hurt my SEO?
2) Is it realistic to pay someone to comb through these and get rid of the bad links?

Thanks!