You get paid (rewarded) Steem Backed Dollars (SBD or SD money) and/or Steem Power (SP) and/or STEEM (or maybe not STEEM, normally) when your upvoted posts and comments are 7 days old. This means you can be paid each day or each hour when your posts and comments are about seven days old, assuming your posts and comments earned enough upvotes assuming other factors as well.

What happens when rewards are not redeemed? Not sure exactly, yet. I am still trying to figure that out.