- This was posted on June 25, 2009

Until about five months ago we were going along pretty much in the status quo. Money wasn’t great but we weren’t behind on any of our bills and all in all things were relatively calm. We even considered moving and had just made a decision to put our home on the market. Despite the economy, houses in our area were selling well and we figured it would be a good time to sell a home in which we had a lot of equity and get a great deal on a bigger house.

Then I lost my job. Many people around me had found themselves out of work but I honestly had not been expecting to be one of them; my industry, and my company specifically, had fared well – or so I thought. So needless to say I was blind sighted by sudden unemployment. We had always lived very carefully but there was never any extra money. Without my paycheck we would be in trouble even with the structured settlement annuity payment that we received every month.

The structured settlement was something that we got because of money that was awarded to us following a personal injury case in which we were involved along with a number of other claimants. In the beginning we thought that the money we were awarded would just be given to us; but it turned out that oftentimes money is distributed in a structured settlement like we are receiving. A structured settlement means that the money is put into an annuity and then you are given it through payments that are made on a scheduled basis. We had gotten very accustomed to our structured settlement payment – it made it much easier to make ends meet.

But now it had gotten to a point where we needed to consider the choice to sell annuity payments so we could eliminate our debt and hunker down. More to come in the next post…

Popularity: 30% [?]

Share This