Your only exposure to the term “structured settlement” may be late night TV ads hawking immediate access to your money. “It’s your money,” they’ll exhort. “Cash in your structured settlement and use your money now!” If you are (or were) a successful plaintiff in a lawsuit, your contact with structures may be more personal. You may have received one, be evaluating one now, or have considered one but opted for cash.
But what should you know? Even if you already have one, you may not know how they operate and why they’re set up in the arcane fashion they are. Like so much else in the world, structured settlements are mostly about taxes.
Cash vs. Periodic Payments. If you’re injured in a car accident and receive a $300,000 settlement from the other driver or insurer, it’s tax free. When you invest the $300,000, your investment earnings are taxable. If you receive a structured settlement instead of the $300,000 cash, you’ll get payments over a term of years or your lifetime (however you choose), and each payment is fully tax free. Thus, a structure converts your after-tax earnings into a tax free return.
Structured settlement brokers (a special type of insurance agent) consult as a case approaches settlement. Brokers are paid standardized commissions by the life insurance company that issues the annuity. Brokers can run many financial projections based on a term of years, payments over your life, over your joint life with your spouse, etc. You can even call for no payments for say 10 or 15 years, with payments starting thereafter as a way to fund your retirement.
Thus, structured settlements are very flexible. Provided that you consider these issues before signing a settlement agreement in your case, you can structure as much or as little as you want and take the rest in cash. With all of this, though, they have to be set up properly.
Mechanics. You can’t own the annuity policy or the tax benefits won’t work. Rather than paying the cash to you or your lawyer, the defendant will send the money for the structure to a life insurance company’s subsidiary called an “assignment company.” The assignment company will buy the annuity from its parent life insurance company, and the assignment company will hold the policy and pay you each month as the contract requires.
