Hi, I can try to open this up. The payments are usually made in 50-50 SP and SBD, but as SBD value is "too high" to Steem total value, they're giving payouts only as in SP and Steem.

If you want more easily usable money, I would stick with 50/50, as SP takes 13 weeks in total to power down to liquid Steem, which can be sold. SP cannot be sold directly.

Depending on where you live, you can sell Steem for another cryptocurrency and then sell it to whaever currency you use. For example I live in the EU area and I'm using Kraken.com (which works in EU and some US states), so I'm using Blocktrades to sell Steem for ETH and then sending ETH to my Kraken.com account. Then I'm selling ETH on Kraken for €€€ and withdrawing to my bank account :)

It sounds more complicated than it is. This just depends on the local laws and services.