Structured settlements provide long-term, scheduled payments to people recovering from serious injuries, the loss of a loved one, and other major life events.  

Like any long-term financial arrangement, this approach works in many situations but not in every case. At times, a person may need immediate funds to keep their home, fix a car, pay medical bills, or support family members.  

Structured settlement transfers give recipients the option to sell a portion of their future payments and receive cash today to help meet their immediate financial needs.  

A recent segment on Last Week Tonight covered our industry. But a fair discussion should include the full picture: structured settlement transfers are highly regulated. Every sale must be approved and ordered by a judge. Pricing is fully disclosed and approved by a court. And if there is a concern raised to us about cognitive capacity, we do not proceed unless it is resolved.

We’d like to share this additional context with you. 

Courts alone decide whether an individual can sell their structured settlement payments.

In every state, a judge must independently review, approve, and order all sales of structured settlement payments. The court must find, on the record, that a sale is in the client’s best interest. We cannot and will not complete a transaction unless a court directly orders it.

As part of this process, the judge can ask questions of the client, request additional documentation, involve family members or advisors, and deny the sale outright if they believe it is not in the client’s best interest.

We are not aware of any other consumer financial transaction—not mortgages, not credit cards, not personal loans—that provides for this type of independent judicial approval to protect clients.

Our discount rate averages about 10% per year.

You may have heard that factoring companies “keep 60% of the money.” That framing can be misleading because it compares payments received over decades with cash paid today. A dollar paid twenty or thirty years from now is not the same as a dollar available today.

A clearer way to understand the cost of a structured settlement sale is by evaluating its annual discount rate—analogous to the interest rate on a loan.

In recent years, our discount rate has averaged about 10% annually. That is meaningfully lower than the rates charged for credit cards, personal loans, vehicle title loans, and most other alternatives available to consumers. 

The discount rate is clearly disclosed to sellers before a sale and must be approved by the court as part of any transaction.

Clients come to us with real-life needs.

People seek to sell their structured settlement payments because they need money for something important: staying in their home, helping a family member, medical bills, starting a business, or paying for school.

If the need is immediate, waiting years for future payments may not be a solution. We help provide an alternative, on terms a judge must first approve.

Some clients return because their financial needs change over time.

A structured settlement can last thirty or forty years. Over that time, a person’s needs may change more than once. Some clients decide that accessing another portion of their future payments makes sense for a new need or goal.

In a small number of cases, the same person has returned multiple times over the years; each of those transactions, like every other, required a separate court order that determined that the transfer was in their best interest.

When cognitive capacity is in doubt, the transaction stops.

Some structured settlement recipients have suffered injuries that may affect memory, judgment, or decision-making. The individual cases that have appeared in recent news coverage are real, and the people in them deserve compassion.

Let us be clear: if a prospective client, family member, attorney, or other source raises a concern to us about cognitive capacity or understanding, we do not proceed unless it is resolved first. When uncertainty remains, we present the concern to the court for its review.

By law, we cannot require prospective clients to disclose their private medical history, including cognitive matters. This is a key reason why judicial review is so important. Judges can ask detailed questions under oath, inquire about medical circumstances, and obtain expert opinions. They can deny a transfer if they are not confident the seller understands the transaction or if they determine that it is not in the seller’s best interest.

Where the system has fallen short, we have consistently advocated for strengthening it—through heightened judicial review, mandatory independent advice, and broader use of guardians ad litem.

We file cases where the law tells us to.

You may have heard claims about “forum shopping”—the idea that companies pick favorable courts. We do not forum shop.

Venue is set by state law, and we follow it. In most cases, that means filing where the seller lives. If a court directs filings to a specific venue, we follow that direction. We do not choose courts to avoid scrutiny or to seek an outcome.

In recent years, a number of states have strengthened their venue rules to ban forum shopping. We have strongly supported these reforms as they codify the same practices we have long followed.

A final note.

Over a million Americans receive structured settlement payments today. Each year, a small portion of them determine—and a judge agrees—that they have an immediate financial need that cannot wait on a future payment. Most have a specific goal, complete one or two transactions, use the money for what they intended, and move on.

We’re proud to have helped more than fifty thousand clients realize their goals over the past thirty years. We appreciate the public’s interest, and we welcome continued conversation with regulators, lawmakers, courts, and the clients we serve.