When a person sustains an injury on the job, they have the right to an injury at work claim. This claim, if won, will result in a settlement. Often times the settlement is a very large amount of money. For both the ease of the company paying the settlement and the long term financial stability of the employee injured, the common practice these days is to have a structured settlement payment.

A structured settlement payment is when the total amount of the claim is broken up in to monthly payments for a certain amount of time. You do, however, have options.

What if you don't want to have monthly payments? Maybe you would like to have a lump sum of money paid upfront. You can get this by selling your structured settlement payments. There are many companies out there that buy your structured settlement payments from you and give you a lump some of money all at once.

There are pros and cons to selling your structured settlement future payments. Let's analyze these pros and cons.

First let's look at the benefits of selling your structured settlement payments. Say you are awarded $500,000 dollars and the company agrees to give you $4,166 dollars a month for the next 10 years. While that being a nice stable income; you can't buy a house with that. You can't invest in anything. You can't move up from your current living status to anything permanent. If you sell those 10 year payments, you could get a large amount of money at once and use it to invest in a house, stocks, bonds, mutual funds; whatever you think would make you more money in the long term. You could start your own business that would generate its own monthly income, possibly even more than what your original structured settlement plan would have given you. The possibilities of how a lump some could help you are endless. From this point of view, selling your settlement payments is a big plus.

So what are the cons of selling your structured payments? As always, when you make money, the government is right there waiting to collect. Structured settlements can be tax free, where as a lump some of money is not. Any thing you do with the lump sum you receive when you sell your settlement payments you must pay taxes on. If you invest in mutual funds or land, you have to pay taxes on it. If you begin your own business with this money, you pay tax on everything you earn from that business.

Another disadvantage to selling your settlement payment is that the company that buys it from you is going to try to give you as little as possible. You want get the sum total that you are owed by your former employer. This is how the buyer benefits from buying your settlement.

So basically, you must look at your financial situation and see which option is best for you, long term payment, or selling and getting a large amount of cash in hand. Consult a financial adviser when you make this decision.