When you are injured due to another party’s negligence, you can usually seek compensation. You can generally only do this once for the particular event, so it is crucial to understand how much you might need and be entitled to before you file a claim or lawsuit.
That means you need to reasonably approximate the full cost of your injuries over your lifetime. You might get treatment, heal relatively quickly and be able to move on. However, some injuries will affect you for the rest of your life. If they affect you, they’ll likely have an effect on members of your immediate family, too.
The younger you are, the longer the injury could affect you
Let’s say you suffer paralysis in a vehicle crash when you are 75 years old. You may well own your house outright by now and perhaps have retired some years ago. If you have kids, they are likely self-supporting adults by now. A court will take all this into account when looking at how much to award you.
If, by contrast, that accident were to occur when you were 30, the court might award you a much larger settlement. They’d consider you and your family to be losing out on around 35 to 40 years of income and support. They’d be looking at the cost of support and care for you for maybe half a century, instead of closer to half a decade in the case of a crash when you were 75. The cost of any medication, therapy and other treatment would also be far greater when required for decades rather than a few years.
To give you some idea of how much the cost can vary with age, 2014 figures from the Christopher Reeve Foundation estimated that the lifetime cost of high paraplegia for health care alone would be nearly $2,600,000 if the injury occurred at 50 years of age, but over $4,700,000 if it occurred at 25. Once you add lost wages and other things into the equation, the difference becomes even larger.
This is not an area you can afford to make mistakes in, so however tempting an early settlement offer might be, it’s always best to seek legal guidance to make sure you do not sell yourself short.