Structured settlements are created so that the owner or recipient can have financial security from compensation that is split up over a set amount of time. A structured settlement is often created after a lawsuit is decided. The final compensation can be set up as a structured settlement instead of a lump sum, which is often in the best interest of everyone that is involved.
A structured settlement can also be set up when lottery winnings are paid out over a period of time instead of in a lump sum. There are plenty of other ways that structured settlements can arise, but these are among the most common ones, according to Yahoo.
Reasons to Use Structured Settlements
In many cases the recipient will make out better with a structured settlement, because the payments over time can be advantageous to those who do not trust their ability to manage a large amount of money, or who know that they will need certain expenses covered by the settlement over a period of time. When they are deferred, it also makes it less of a financial burden in the short term to the parties making the payments.
Now a days, it’s no longer difficult to find ways to get cash for your structured settlement. It used to be nearly impossible to get a fair deal in a short amount of time. It used to take a long time to find one buyer, let alone set up a situation where you could have a few buyers bidding on your structured settlement. As a result of the change in the way things work, more and more people are benefitting and selling their structured settlements for cash.
Get Cash Quickly
You can really get cash in a hurry for your structured settlements, according to the Structured Settlements Blog. The process is pretty simple and straightforward. Visit a site like www.StructuredSettlement-Quotes.com, and fill out the relevant information in order to request a quote. This is usually a quick and easy process, and you won’t have to provide too much information. Just tell them about your structured settlements, how many payments are remaining and how large they are and then fill in some contact information.
Once that happens, the company in question will get some quotes from potential buyers. They’ll provide you with the best ones, and you will then have a period of time to consider the quotes and decide whether or not to accept one. Usually you’ll have a day or two to decide. You will not be under any obligation to accept one, so it’s a risk-free way to evaluate your options and find out how much money you can get for your structured settlements.
What Happens Next
After you accept an offer, the process of completing the sale will begin. This will involve filling out more forms and documents in order to transfer ownership. You will need to allow some time for everything to be processed and to go through court, and you may need to speak in front of a judge in order to explain why the sale of your structured settlement is in your best interest. They will make a ruling on whether or not to allow the sale, and then you’ll receive your cash right away.
In some cases, the buyer of a structured settlement will even front some of the money to the seller so that they do not have to wait for the process to play out. This can be particularly useful in times when the money is needed in a hurry for an important financial obligation.
Advantages of New Processes
In the past, it was really difficult for most sellers to navigate the process. They didn’t have clear-cut instructions and they had to find a way to locate a potential buyer and then complete the transaction. Now, there are websites that basically serve as marketplaces. This shifts the power in the transaction so that there is more of a balance between the buyer and the seller in terms of leverage. When the buyers know that there are multiple people competing, they are more likely to offer more money and the seller is going to have an increased chance of getting a better deal. On the other hand, the old process used to leave the seller with only one buyer. That meant that they had little or no negotiating power and had to try to get the most out of only one buyer who knew that he or she did not have any competition.
If you are considering selling a structured settlement, you are fortunate to live in a time when the Internet offers a lot more options than sellers had in the past. This has created a shift in the marketplace for selling structured settlements, which can be felt both online and offline. However, there are still advantages to selling your structured settlement online.
Quicker Process
When you sell your structured settlement online, you will be able to work your way through a very quick process. You’ll visit a website like www.StructuredSettlement-Quotes.com, and then provide them with some basic information about yourself. This will include you contact information. Then you can fill out a form about the remaining payments on your structured settlement, as well as any other pertinent details. This entire process can be done at once and shouldn’t take up much of your time.
After you provide the information, the quotes will start coming in very quickly. They’ll screen out the best quotes and then provide them to you to consider, at which point you can make a decision on whether or not to accept one and go ahead and sell your structured settlements. This part of the process can move very quickly when you sell online, and it can be wrapped up in just a couple of days.
This enables you to move toward the sale a lot faster, which means that you can get the cash that you need in a hurry. As a result, it is a huge advantage in selling your structured settlements online.
Easy to Understand the Process
When you sell your structured settlement online, you can easily pull up step-by-step instructions and read them so that you understand what is happening and what information you need to provide.
This way you won’t have to worry about whether or not you missed anything or provided all of the necessary information. You simply follow the steps and then wait for the quotes to come rolling in. It really doesn’t get any easier than that.
In addition to being simple, it won’t require much work. You don’t have to worry about making a phone call or scheduling a meeting. You can simply fill out the forms that are needed on your own time in the comfort of your own home.
More Offers and Better Offers
When you sell your structured settlement online, you are increasing your chances of getting more offers and higher offers. This is because the people who want to buy your structured settlement know that they are competing with a number of other buyers. As a result, they will offer more money to increase their odds of placing the winning bid.
This is a far cry from the offline process in the past, because it used to be very difficult to find buyers. You’d be lucky to find one person interested in buying your structured settlement, let alone enough to create a bidding war.
If you have considered selling your structured settlement before, you may have had a difficult time locating potential buyers. This has been a common problem in the past, so it has caused a lot of people to shy away from selling their structured settlements. However, if you believe that it might be in your best interest to investigate your options with regard to selling your structured settlement, you owe it to yourself to find some potential buyers. Then you can get quotes and figure out exactly how much cash could be on the table for your structured settlement.
Benefits of Selling a Structured Settlement
There are a number of advantages to selling your structured settlement. Some of them are predicated around short-term benefits, while others are part of a long-term strategy that can lead to more financial security in the future.
If you have short-term financial needs that you cannot afford to handle, then selling your structured settlement can get you the lump sum of money that you need in order to solve your financial problems. Often times, periodic payments aren’t enough to help, but the lump sum from the structured settlement can be enough to make a major difference in your current financial situation.
Another scenario might arise when you have an investment opportunity that you cannot afford to take advantage of given your current financial situation. However, when you sell your structured settlement, you will have the large amount of money needed to make the investment. This can give you great financial security in the future.
Find Out if You Can Sell Your Structured Settlement
According to WikiHow, the first step in the process of deciding whether or not to sell is simply to determine whether or not you can sell your structured settlement. Some structured settlements are not transferable at all, but usually that will not be the case. In fact, even if there is some language in yours that says it is not transferable, you should speak to an expert.
In many cases, courts will rule for the owner of the structured settlement to be able to sell it if it is in their best interest. Thus, you shouldn’t give up just because you aren’t entirely sure whether you’ll be able to sell it. In fact, in some states, there are laws on the books that protect the rights of owners of structured settlements to be able to sell them, regardless of what any language in the agreement itself says.
How to Find the Buyers
The new way to find structured settlement buyers certainly beats the old one. All you have to do now is visit a website like StructuredSettlement-Quotes.com and fill out the forms to provide information about your structured settlement. Once you provide some details about the remaining payments and the value of your structured settlement, they will be able to get you some great quotes on offers to buy it from you for a lump sum of money. When buyers compete with each other to put in the best bid, it benefits you greatly.
More and more people are finding that selling their structured settlements can be a huge benefit to their financial well-being. There are a lot of reasons to consider selling your structured settlements, so you should definitely consider whether it is right for you.
Before you can decide whether you should go through with a sale or not, you need to try to figure out what a reasonable offer would be on the remaining payments in your structured settlements.
Discounting Payments for Time
When you sell your structured settlements now, you’ll have to understand that you will not get the full value of the remaining payments. There are a couple of reasons for this. The first is that money now is worth more than the same amount of money in the future, as it will have the opportunity to gain interest over time. As a result, the fair value for the structured settlement is actually less than the total sum of the remaining payments.
In addition, you have to keep in mind that the people buying structured settlements do need to turn a profit, so that will be factored into the discounted rate as well. Thus, you’ll want to make sure that you have realistic expectations with regard to how much money you expect to receive for your structured settlement. Once you do that, you can proceed in the process and try to get a few quotes and weigh your options.
How to Get Quotes
It’s really easy now to get quotes for your structured settlements, according to Market Watch. All you have to do is find a site that is offering quotes, such as www.StructuredSettlement-Quotes.com. You can then enter a little bit of information about your structured settlement, as well as your contact information. They will then shop your structured settlement around to buyers, looking for the best offers.
If you are considering selling your structured settlement, you need to know how much it is worth so that you understand whether or not the offers that you are getting are fair and reasonable. Given that you will be able to get quotes off of a marketplace that pits different buyers against one another, you should have a reasonably high likelihood of getting a good offer. The process online tilts the leverage in your favor by creating competition.
Even with that said, you need to know what your structured settlement is worth so that you can set a target price that you will receive. Make sure that you evaluate all of the factors carefully and make a decision that is not based upon impulse so that you do not make a decision that you regret in the future.
In order to figure out the present value, there are a number of different things that you need to take into account. They are laid out below, based on the present value calculator from StructuredSettlement-Quotes.com.
When creating the terms for the structured settlement payments that one would receive to help deal with the aftermath of an injury, many factors are going to come into play. Some of the things that you are going to have to determine while coming up with the settlement include the date the settlement will begin, the duration of the payments and the periods at which the payments come due. Determining the amount of the payments is important as well, and considers other things, such as the current age of the claimant, all monthly expenses, retirement plans, and more.
In some cases, the payments are going to be tax-free. Payments made to an estate might be free of income tax, for example. However, they will have an estate tax associated with them. If you have a payment plan in place and it is currently tax-free, then you are not going to want to change the plan, at least not without consulting with a specialist. In fact, making changes to the settlement agreement once it is in place is not always an easy task.
Structured settlements represent your victory in court over the individual or company who caused you injury. Most structured settlements are the result of a personal injury case, or a liability case (but that’s not necessarily always the case). The structuring of your settlement was done for a number of reasons, including to help ease the financial burden on the defendant, and it was also based on your needs at the time, but needs change. Can you use structured settlement money for today’s needs?
Changing Needs
Life is all about change. Hopefully, those changes are for the better, but all too often, they’re not. For instance, if your settlement came about as the result of a personal injury, your payments certainly helped pay for medical bills at the time. But what if you’ve now lost your job due to your injury? What if you’re facing foreclosure on your home? In instances like these, it would be nice to have a lump sum of cash, simply because those monthly payments aren’t enough to meet your financial needs today.
How You Can Change Your Circumstances
While you can’t go back in time and revisit your original settlement case, there is a way that you can start using structured settlement money for today’s needs. You can sell part or all of your payments to a company that buys structured settlements and get cash up front. How does this work? It’s at once simple and complex.
When most people think about winning the lottery, they imagine receiving a huge lump sum of money all at one time. However, the reality is that most people avoid the lump sum payment option when buying their ticket, choosing the “annuity” payout instead. This puts winners immediately into a “structured settlement” arrangement. While lottery winnings might not be the same thing as a personal injury case settlement, the outcome is very similar.
In essence, you are choosing to receive your money in installments over the course of time. The structure of those payments (when, how long, how much per payment, etc.) is usually up to you, so you can choose to have as much or as little structure as you like. You can often choose to structure part of the settlement into payments and receive the remainder as a lump sum upfront, but that is really your decision.
The situation seems simple enough, and the choice to accept payments rather than a lump sum seems like a “no-brainer”. Wouldn’t it be better to receive your money over time, like a paycheck? While it might make sense, it doesn’t always work the way you think it would. When considering what structured settlements are, you’ll need to realize that life has a way of changing the game and once you have opted for a structured settlement and the payout format is in place, it’s pretty much set. Your money will technically be locked away from you, inaccessible except for those periodic payments.
Settlement Quotes provides a marketplace for structured settlement purchasers. We provide you with up to 6 quotes and bids for your future structured settlement payments from top cash flow funding companies.
Structured settlement purchasers are able to provide a lump sum payment in exchange for your periodic and future structured settlement payments.
Settlement Quotes will find the best purchaser for your structured settlement payments from our list of Certified Funding Partners. As our Funding Partners compete for your business, the discount rate decreases. This provides you with thousands of extra dollars in your lump sum payment.
The national average discount rate is 19.2%. Settlement Quotes provides you with an average discount rate of 9%. This has turned Settlement Quotes into the leading structured settlement marketplace in the industry. We consistently provide our clients with the best quotes. Not only do you receive the best quotes, but we do our best to provide the fastest service in the industry. This usually takes between 6 to 8 weeks to accomplish.
If you would like to sell your structured settlement payments, please fill out the short form on the left or call us at 888-665-1257. We will provide you with up to six quotes and bids from top structured settlement purchasing companies.
