How to Get the Most out of Your Structured Settlement

When investing money in stocks, bonds, and other forms of investments, you would do whatever it took to get the most from the money being spent.  Although a structured settlement is different, it operates on the same concept.  Because you locked into this agreement in the first place due to injury sustained as a result of negligence of a person or company, you may as well learn how to get the most out of your structured settlement.  After all, you deserve the awarded money but also whatever you can add to this by making the right decisions.

When investing money in stocks, bonds, and other forms of investments, you would do whatever it took to get the most from the money being spent.  Although a structured settlement is different, it operates on the same concept.  Because you locked into this agreement in the first place due to injury sustained as a result of negligence of a person or company, you may as well learn how to get the most out of your structured settlement.  After all, you deserve the awarded money but also whatever you can add to this by making the right decisions.

To help you move in the right direction, we have provided some strategies to increase the performance of your structured settlement.  Although your attorney or perhaps the insurance company backing the settlement could provide you with guidance, the right and responsibility of making good decisions also falls back on you.  Rather than feel confused or overwhelmed, remember that you have a world of information to help you along the way.  As far as options, the key is to use the right strategies to boost performance whether investing or selling.

No matter the type of structured settlement annuity you have, life annuity, temporary life annuity, lump sum annuity, life only annuity, joint and survivor annuity, or something else, you want to make decisions that would take your investment and provide you with a nice profit.  Even if you were interested in selling your annuity payments, you want to get the most money possible, pay the lowest fees being offered, and work with a structured settlement company that operates on grounds of integrity.

Strategies to increase the performance of your Structured Settlement

Here is the bottom line, using the right strategies would allow you to get the most out of your structured settlement would have a direct link to the quality of your future.  When good investments are made you would end up with more money on which to live and enjoy but when bad investments are made, you could find yourself in a serious financial situation.  One of the first strategies is that for awarded money, we suggest you put some into a high yield interest savings account and some into municipal bonds.  Although the return with municipal bonds would not be significantly high, this is a safe and consistent investment.

Another strategy to help you get all you can from your structured settlements is to make sure you pay off debt before making investments.  Of course, as part of the agreement this is to be done anyway but make a commitment and follow through.  For instance, if you have credit cards with high interest, they are sucking the very life out of you so using money awarded to pay credit cards off immediately puts you in better control of your financial future.

Now, we want to move onto strategies for getting the most out of your structured settlement when selling.  For this, you want to start by researching various structured settlement companies that buy payments.  Look at their history, philosophy, go to online forums specific to this sector to see what other people are saying, and even check with the Better Business Bureau to identify any complaints.  Along with choosing the right company, you would need to take some responsibility for the outcome of the structured settlement sale.

Keep in mind that any company buying payments from this type of settlement must abide by laws under the Structured Settlement Protection Act.  Although the average purchase of structured settlement payments takes between 60 and 120 days, if you were to fail to do a few basic steps the process could take much longer.  To keep things rolling make sure all documentation is 100% complete.  Documentation is very important when selling.  For instance, the Sale Agreement, Annuity Policy or latest check stub, Benefits Letter, legal photo identification, your divorce degree if divorced, and instructions regarding wiring the money into your account are all critical.

Many people feel that the process of selling structured settlement payments fails because everything seems to take so much time but in reality, the holdup is sometimes the result of missing information, whether from you or the company.  Therefore, the strategy to boost performance for selling your settlement payments involves working with the right structured settlement company but also paying close attention to your involvement when it comes to documentation.

Of all documents, the Benefits Letter is the piece most often missing.  For this, the issuer of the structured settlement would need to stipulate exact payments that you have legal right to sell.  With this letter, the owner of the payments would be clear.  What happens is that once all required documentation has been submitted to the structured settlement company, they in turn would hire independent counsel in your area who would submit all the necessary documentation to the courts.  Although the Benefits Letter is not your responsibility, understanding what it is and the important role it plays would allow you to do a little prompting to finalize the sale of payments quicker.