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Personal Injury Calculator: Determining the Value
of Your Injury Settlement...
A good automatic personal injury calculator doesn't exist. Too many
variables must be considered and personal injury settlement averages
vary across states and counties.
By now you've got a pretty good understanding of how to make a personal
injury insurance claim.
You know what to do and say to make that claim stick in different
bodily injury settlement situations. Now we need
to figure out exactly how to place
a value on your damages.
Using a calculator for settlement amounts is tricky
because no settlement has an exact or predetermined worth.
In the personal injury insurance
claim business, there are too many non-monetary factors that need to be
given a cash
settlement value.
Since no two people will agree on what these cash
values are, reaching a final amount isn’t a perfect science. Anyone
using a computer program to get a settlement amount
must give it a considerable margin of error.
A computer
program can't feel, and can't put a value on things like:
-inconvenience
-physical and emotional pain
-stress
-loss of enjoyment of life
-inablility to complete responsibilities
-loss of consortium (ability to engage in a spousal relationship)
-inability to do things you enjoy (like play with your child)
Judges and juries are able to consider things like this. They can
empathize with a victim, something a personal injury calculator
program can't do.
Adjusters
do have formulas that help them (many even use an injury
calculator personal settlement program known as Colossus).
If you can understand these
formulas, you’ll be better prepared going into your insurance
settlement negotiations. You
don’t have to be in the insurance business to know how
these formulas work, and
you don’t have to be a lawyer to use them.
The truth is, anyone
can follow a few basic concepts and arrive at an injury settlement
figure on their own. All that’s needed is the total of the special
damages (documented costs) and a dollar value for
pain and suffering.
Granted, the more experience
you have, the
easier it'll be knowing the range of these figures. This is where a
consultation with an attorney becomes so valuable. They
have the experience of hundreds, sometimes even thousands of injury
cases to draw from.
However, for the
kind of insurance claim you're most likely to deal with, the amounts
won’t be high enough for the lack of experience to matter. But, as
noted in the first
section, if your case involves very high damages
it's best to talk to a lawyer before approaching an insurance company.
When trying to come up with a settlement figure, there's one
important thing to keep in mind overall...
What are the
liable parties' actual responsibilities?
First,
any money lost in relation to your injury must be repaid. This includes
bills you or your insurance company paid and wages you lost.
Then
the liable party must pay for pain and suffering. This includes pain
and suffering you've already experienced and may experience in the
future, especially if your injury is long-term or permanent.
The liable
party is also responsible for emotional damages and missed experiences,
whether educational, social or family related.
In
the next few
sections we'll look at how this is all put together in the
damages
formula, it's the closest thing you'll get to a personal injury
calculator that uses a human's reasoning ability.
Your final numbers won’t necessarily be the amount you receive, but
it's a beginning point for
starting insurance settlement negotiations.
Return
from Personal Injury Calculator to Personal
Injury Compensation
Return
from Personal Injury Calculator to Personal
Injury Settlement Guide
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