Whether you were to receive money from a personal injury claim or a workers’ compensation action, you could have options on how you access your funds. In Georgia, two of the most common options are called structured settlements and lump sum payments.
Understanding how each of these may affect your life is probably going to be a prerequisite of making the best possible choice. Your future and your current finances both have the potential to receive positive or negative effects based on whether you choose to receive your money over a long period of time or get all of it in advance.
A type of investment called an annuity is the most common way of establishing structured settlements. As explained in Georgia statute, these are designed to give you regular payments for the duration of the investment. Furthermore, your annuity would be restricted in terms of who gets to receive the funds. Transferring ownership or benefit rights for these types of assets might be complicated. Make sure you know the details before you attempt to make any changes if you already have a structured settlement.
Lump-sum payments may also be beneficial in some situations. For example, you may want to get a lump sum if you had medical debt. This could allow you to pay your debt and stop accruing interest.
Most injury settlements and some workers’ compensation cases deal with multiple types of fund access. In the context of the previous example of large medical bills, you could want to take a lump sum to pay off the immediate debts and then receive the rest of your settlement over an extended period of time. This could be advantageous for tax reasons. It could also allow you to manage your money better. However, this is not specific legal advice. Please only take it as background information.
