Baric Funding

How do Settlement Funding Companies help Lottery Winners?

I was lucky enough to win the US lottery at 29 years of age. You’d think that this would be the answer to all my problems, and to some extent it was. $250,000 dollars goes a long way, but in this day and age, it is more of a security blanket than a life changing sum. I therefore did the sensible thing and stayed in my job at a motor company and made arrangements to pay off my mortgage, buy that’76 Camaro that I always dreamed of and arranged a holiday for my wife and me. So my life was improved, but it still wasn’t going to be plain sailing for the rest of my days. Well it turned out that It wasn’t going to be that easy to do these either.

The US lottery wanted to release my payments over a period of 35 years, by which time I would be the grand old age that my heroes Lennon and McCartney always sang about in the song “When I’m 64.”

This simply wouldn’t do. By this time my wife wouldn’t find me attractive anymore and will have probably have eloped with the younger, better looking gardener ,Juan, who will have probably built a successful landscaping business that would dwarf my yearly payments. I needed to act faster and didn’t know where to turn.

As a man of Dutch European descent, I knew nothing about the way the American system worked, as lottery winners in Europe get their dividends in one beautiful (although taxable) payment. Luckily I have some good friends over here, one of which, Stewie, told me about the existence of settlement funding companies. A settlement funding company will grant you the full amount of your lottery win in one payment and take a 23% cut. So I stood to lose 57,500 bucks. I had a lot of thinking to do.

The more I thought about settlement funding, the more the faces of Juan and McCartney kept popping into my head in my dreams. Juan on board a ship with my bride, toasting the sunset, and McCartney sat, miserable on a mountain of cash, going over his recent divorce settlement.

I needed that funding and quick. Within a few days, I had asked the assistance of my otherwise useless, alcoholic friend Stewie to run me thought the basic principles of the settlement funding company. Within a week, the wonderful people in the settlement funding company had made arrangements for the money to be paid in full, and a new Camaro sat on my drive.

And what happened to the rest of the money? After my wife won half of it in the divorce, she funded Juan’s very successful landscaping company and eloped to Boca Raton, leaving me with a pile of old Beatles records, a car that I can’t afford parts for and a bunch of buddies who listen to me moaning about my problems as I drink away the rest of my winnings.

Such is life.