When someone is planning to sell structured settlements, he or she wants the money as soon as possible. That’s why it is important to have the policy early in the process when you sell structured settlements. When you have the policy, you save time in two ways.

• First, you save the structured settlement factoring company from having to request another copy of the policy for you. And that saves at least three or four weeks.

• Second, you reduce the chance of error, because your factoring company has all the correct information from the beginning. Less chance of error means less chance of having to fix mistakes and re-do paperwork. Which saves time when you have one thing on your mind: sell structured settlement.

If this is important to you: sell structured settlement. Then know this: find your policy.

Even in today’s digital world, when you sell structured settlements, it’s still a paper transaction. And the most important paper of all is the policy.

The policy confirms all of the details about what is being bought and sold, including payment amounts and dates and all of the parties involved in the transaction: the annuitant, insurance company, policy owner, and beneficiaries.

In other words, the policy is the buyer’s record of what the insurance company is paying. The court must see the policy and the buyer can’t close the transaction without the policy. So if the seller has the policy at the beginning of the transaction, it speeds the process and helps eliminate errors—and errors are the major causes of funding delays.

Here’s how it works: The structured settlement factoring company needs the information from the policy in order to draft the paperwork when you sell structured settlements. If there are any mistakes in the documents drafted by the structured settlement factoring company, the insurance companies who own the payments will insist the structured settlement factoring company revise the documents—which delays the entire transaction.

Here is an example of a little mistake that could cause a big delay: The date of the expected structured settlement payment stated in the disclosure says December 14, 2012, but the payment is actually due December 1, 2012. This discrepancy would raise a flag at the insurance company. Worse, it would mean postponing the hearing and the whole process. Though the date is only off by 13 days, the insurance company could force a delay of three months because in extreme cases, it may require the parties to start the entire process all over again.

And it all could have been avoided if the seller had given the structured settlement factoring company the policy at the beginning of the transaction and before it drafted the original documents.

So it makes sense to get the policy to the structured settlement factoring company as soon as possible. It also makes sense for people who sell structured settlements to find the policy themselves in their files, boxes, or drawers—wherever they stored it. Because it can take three-to-four weeks for a structured settlement factoring company to obtain a policy from the insurance company on behalf of the seller. Longer if there are issues with the insurance company.

Therefore, it is worth it for the seller to take the time and effort to find the policy directly so the structured settlement company doesn’t have to wait to get it from the insurance company. And the sooner the structured settlement factoring company gets the policy, the more accurate the documents and the less chance of error—and delay.