If you have a structured settlement where you receive your personal injury claim, award, or settlement over time, you may be able to withdraw the settlement. To do this, you sell some or all of your future payments in exchange for getting cash now. If all parties agree, L&I will draft the settlement agreement, distribute it for signature, and submit the contract to the BIIA for approval. If the BIIA approves the agreement, there is a 30-day revocation period.
Either party to the agreement may revoke consent to the agreement for any reason during the revocation period. L&I will continue to process the claim and pay the benefits to which it is entitled during the revocation period. Compliance with the requirements set out in § 59.1-475.1 and compliance with the conditions set out in §§ 59.1-476 and 59.1-477 shall be the sole responsibility of the transferee in any transfer of structured settlement payment rights, and neither of the structured settlement debtor nor the annuity the issuer assume any liability for, or any other liability arising from failure to comply with such requirements or failure to comply with such conditions. The court process was established to protect owners of structured agreements from being exploited.
Nothing in this chapter shall be construed to authorize any transfer of structured settlement payment rights in contravention of any law. When deciding whether to withdraw your structured settlement payments, you should ask the companies that can purchase them a few questions. The discounted present value of the payments to be transferred, which shall be identified as the calculation of the present value of the structured settlement payments transferred under federal rules for the valuation of annuities, and the amount of the applicable federal rate used to calculate such discounted current rate value;. After the settlement money is negotiated and final terms are reached, the court order will request that the funds be placed in a type of income annuity contract called structured annuities.
You should also consider whether you can dispense with income from your structured settlement and whether your need for a lump sum is valid and more important than that income. A structured settlement purchasing company considers market conditions and the future value of money to determine how much money it can give you for your payments. With a structured agreement, the defendant's insurer typically funds an annuity policy for the plaintiff. Settlement payments are usually a lump sum (all at once) or structured (regular payments over a period of time).
The Federal Periodic Payment Settlement Act of 1982 made court approval mandatory for all sales of structured settlements to ensure that the best interests of the consumer come first and limit any party from taking advantage of the payee of the settlement. The assignee shall file an application under this chapter for approval of a transfer of structured settlement payment rights and shall be submitted to the circuit court of the county or city in which the payee is domiciled in the Commonwealth, except that if the payee is not domiciled in the Commonwealth, the application can be filed with the Commonwealth court that approved the structured settlement agreement. Since the structured settlement annuity is essentially an income annuity, inheritance is treated as such. But you also have an unexpected financial need, and structured settlement payments aren't enough to pay your bills.
Issues outside of the Workers' Compensation Insurance Act (Title 51 RCW), such as labor claims and disputes or discrimination, cannot be resolved as part of a structured settlement agreement. This can be a problem if you are facing a high expense that your scheduled structured settlement payments cannot cover. No payee intending to make a transfer of structured settlement payment rights shall incur any penalty, forfeit any application fee or other payment, or incur any liability to the proposed assignee or any assignee on the basis that such transfer does not meet the conditions of this chapter. .
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