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.

The simple explanation is that a structured settlement buyer will purchase your payments in one of several ways. You can opt to sell just part of your payments and receive the money for them. You can sell the majority of your payments and receive a larger sum of money. You can also choose to sell all of your payments, in which case you will receive the most money possible from the company, but you will not receive any more payments on the settlement (the payments will instead go to the purchaser).

Given the complexity here and the number of different companies that can help you start using structured settlement money for today’s needs, it’s important that you work with a reputable broker to ensure you get the right deal. A good structured settlements company can help you receive offers from qualified companies and determine which of those offers is right for you.