Injuries can be stressful for anyone who gets hurt while on the job. However, the financial burden that may follow with this only adds to this stress. An important part of ensuring you get fair workers’ compensation is calculating the holistic effects of receiving an injury while working.
Income or Profits
The most straightforward aspect of receiving an injury that puts you out of work is how much income or profit did you lose during your injury and recovery period. This can be as simple as multiplying your daily wage by how many days you had to take off in order to properly recover. If you happened to lose a current business venture during the time of your injury, you can sum that in as well. This is by far the most tangible aspect of lost income, but other factors may make this base figure of lost income climb.
Sick or Vacation Days
Recovering from an injury can take a period of time that widely varies. This recovery period may force you to burn through paid sick days or vacation time offered by your company. However, this loss of time and wages isn’t always of your own doing, rather the injury you received while working, and can be totaled along with the rest of your lost wages.
Earning Capacity
Does your job involve a perishable skill? Did you become less effective at your job than before the injury occurred? This is categorized into lost earning capacity. If you are working a job that requires a high degree of skill and the injury and recovery time have made you less effective at this skill, you have lost earning capacity compared to before you were injured.
Business Opportunities or Goodwill of Current Customers
If your injury forces you away from the environment where you can negotiate and develop pending business ventures and those opportunities fall through, this can also be calculated into your total lost income due to an injury. If your time off or injury causes current clients to lose faith in your ability to accomplish your work, this is also a portion of the income you lost.
Takeaway
Lost income can assume a wide variety of forms, and you must do your due diligence in accounting for all ways that you lost compensation for your work to an injury. It is important to have this 10,000-foot view when negotiating workers’ compensation should your injury lead you to a situation that requires negotiating total lost income.
Author Info: Shae Holland is a professional copywriter with expertise on a range of topics. She’s passionate about healthy living, loves hunting, and relishes philosophical conversations.
