 |
| |
Personal Injury Insurance Settlements:
Compensation for Lost Income...
All personal injury insurance settlements should include compensation
for past and future lost income.
On top of obvious special
damages like medical bills, in a bodily injury claim there
are
usually damages suffered from
loss of work income.
After an accident it's not always possible to immediately
return to your job. Sometimes you're ordered to bedrest. Or perhaps
you've broken a leg or arm, and working would be impossible.
This
missed work
costs you money. And since this lost income resulted from
an accident caused by someone else, you're able to include it in your
personal injury insurance settlement.
For the most part, documenting lost work
is a simple procedure. Once you return to your job, request a letter
confirming the work you missed from your Human Resources department.
The HR letter
should state:
-how many days of work you missed; and
-what your
wages would have been for those days
The total arrived at will be your
claim for lost income.
That's easy enough. But what if your job already compensated you for
the days you missed? A
lot of people are lucky enough to get paid for sick days or to receive
vacation pay.
In those cases it would appear no income was lost at all.
But in fact this isn’t true. Even though you're paid by your company,
you still have the right to seek the same amount in your insurance
settlement.
Why should
you seek compensation for sick days?
Because the inflicted injury took
away something you could have used at a later time. There are only so
many sick days allowed. If the injury forced you to use seven of them,
then you can’t use them again. Those seven sick days were worth seven
days of wages, and are therefore considered lost income.
This
is even more apparent when it comes to vacation pay. No one
wants to
use their vacation days lying in bed injured. So even though you're
paid for those days, the insurance settlement still has to compensate
your wages.
The lost wages you're claiming will be added to the
total
claim after your other damages are figured. This means the
lost
income won’t be worked into the damages formula we've already looked at.
If
you determined that your pain and suffering damages are worth three
times your
other damages, lost wages aren’t multiplied along with that number.
Past and future lost income is added to the end
total of personal injury insurance settlements.
Return
from Personal Injury Insurance Settlements to Personal
Injury Compensation
Return
from Personal Injury Insurance Settlements to Personal
Injury Settlement Guide
Personal Injury Areas
The accuracy of information on this site is not guaranteed. Information on this site is strictly opinion and should not be considered formal legal advice. Under no circumstances should the information on this site be used to make decisions about the proper course of a legal matter.Click below to read our full User Agreement, Disclaimer and Copyright Information.

|
|