Unlocking Insurance Secrets: 5 Tips Every Homeowner Must Know

Dylan Silver (00:00.875)
Hey folks, welcome back to the show. I’m your host, Dylan Silver, and today on the show I have Andy Rouhafzai, insurance adjuster, entrepreneur. Andy, welcome to the show.

Andy Rouhafzai (00:14.776)
Thanks for having me, Dylan. I’m really pumped to be here and talk about everybody’s favorite slash most boring topic, insurance claims.

Dylan Silver (00:22.487)
You know, I would have agreed with you, but we had a little discussion here before hopping on here Which really opened my eyes to something that I don’t know about I’m a realtor here in Dallas wholesaler and I’ve worked with investors before and Especially everything that I’ve seen happen Multiple different states with disasters you mentioned before hopping on here. There was a I’m in Dallas, but in Austin capital, right? Texas there was a big storm

last week hail and all these other types of damage and So I guess briefly What is the role of an insurance adjuster for myself and for folks who may not be aware?

Andy Rouhafzai (01:02.21)
Yeah, so I’ll actually take a step back because there’s basically three types of insurance adjusters, right? So you have staff adjusters and you have what are called independent adjusters. Both of those will work for the insurance company. My rule of thumb is whoever is paying your paycheck is who you work for. So even though they call themselves independent adjusters, they really do. They get their paychecks on the insurance company. So what I actually am is what’s called a public adjuster or a public insurance adjuster.

It’s a silly name, frankly, because what does adjusting even mean in the first place? But basically what it means is that I work for the homeowner or the policy holder, and I only work for that homeowner or policy holder. And there’s only two people that can represent you when you have a property damage insurance claim. that’s going to be, well, you can represent yourself, of course, which is what most people do. You can hire an attorney or you can hire a public adjuster. And those are the only people that are legally authorized to negotiate with the insurance claim on your behalf.

Dylan Silver (01:58.835)
Okay, so public adjuster, when you’re coming in, is a public adjuster also assessing damage? Is this a third party that does this?

Andy Rouhafzai (02:09.484)
Yeah. So that’s one of the core functions of the public adjuster, right? So somehow, and you’ll notice how like every insurance company markets so heavily for trust, right? You’re in good hands, like a good neighbor. We’ve seen the thing or two. They’ve somehow convinced people through their billions of dollars of advertising that they are the first person that you should call when you suffer property damage. But like in what other situation do you trust the person that owes you money to tell you how much they owe you? So

Dylan Silver (02:30.283)
Yeah.

Andy Rouhafzai (02:38.38)
What we do is we are there to represent just the policy holder. And it is a negotiation. Make no mistake that the insurance claim process is a negotiation. They are not engineers. The actual requirements to become an adjuster are really, really, really easy. It’s like I took a test over a weekend and boom, you’re a licensed adjuster. It’s too easy. There’s nothing in there that makes you have to determine how much damage is. And if you really want to go down the rabbit hole, there were some all state Senate hearings.

and some whistleblowers on State Farm. And there was a 60-minute segment all this year, 2025, all talking about how insurance companies are like top to bottom, intentionally trying to underpay claims or deny them outright.

Dylan Silver (03:21.751)
You know that kind of checks out right these are not nonprofits at the end of the day You know one of the things that I’ve seen and I don’t know what I don’t know right so so feel free to steer us down the right path here if I’m asking questions that are off off the the path here so to speak is we of course saw a big disaster with the fires in California we saw the hail damage here in Texas, you know

Andy Rouhafzai (03:26.008)
Yeah.

Dylan Silver (03:45.087)
lot of my podcast guests here, our podcast guests are in the Florida area and they’re dealing with their own, right? I want to say that Carolina’s had an issue this year as well. And so with all these issues going on, are adjusters by and large specific to one area or because of everything is now digital, are they going across the country? What is the typical business of an adjuster look like?

Andy Rouhafzai (04:09.646)
Sure. for, for my side, so for the public adjuster side, I work right now in about five States. It is tough. Some States require me to do more things in person versus I can do a lot virtually on the insurance company side. I mean, and licensure is done by state. Um, now most States do allow me to operate in other States, as long as I pay them their license money. Um, but just in the sense of how I get leads and how I get business, it’s more of a referral based business. So I’m not often.

Like when California had the wildfires, had like three, just like family, friends or friends of friends reach out and had me review their policies. I wasn’t licensed in California. Most people that I talked to were getting screwed though. They did not have enough coverage to, I mean, I talked to people that are losing hundreds of thousands of dollars because they don’t have the right coverage.

Dylan Silver (04:56.215)
So what, break that down for us, right? So what, when we’re talking about right coverage, I’m thinking if I have my home insured and it sets on fire or it gets hit by hail and it’s no longer inhabitable or a hurricane comes over and rips the roof off of it, like I’m getting covered. But apparently that’s not the case.

Andy Rouhafzai (05:15.598)
Yeah. So there’s, there’s kind of three main things at play, right? So most people are hyper fixated on getting the smallest or the lowest premium possible, but not all policies are created equal. Like I said, I don’t sell insurance. don’t make like commission for selling more insurance. Generally speaking, I actually hate the insurance companies, but I still recommend you have the right amount of coverage. So there’s actually basically three types of coverage that every policy should have. And most policies do have, but then you also need to make sure that the amounts are correct there too.

Dylan Silver (05:40.3)
Yeah.

Andy Rouhafzai (05:40.462)
So you have coverage A, which is your dwelling coverage, right? What happens to my house if there’s a covered loss? Don’t skimp there. Like for example, if you have a fire and it burns down the whole house, you might be fine. But there’s another scenario, which is where you have a fire, it doesn’t burn down the whole house, but you have to then pay money to mitigate the loss. These mitigation companies are expensive. So you need to maybe make sure if your house is worth $500,000, I would juice it up to $600,000 and give yourself a 20 % kind of buffer there.

to make sure that you have enough money in case you need to spend on mitigation, debris removal, things like that. Coverage two is the stuff inside your house. Unless you have like, and usually it’s a formula, usually it’s like 30 % of what you have for your house. You probably don’t need to make any changes there, because unless you’ve got like a ton of designer clothes and purses, which my wife kind of has, you probably don’t need your like 30 % of your house value or more in your personal property.

but also make sure that you understand that if you have certain things like jewelry, you have to put them in your scheduled personal property. Meaning like a normal policy might say, hey, we cover jewelry, but only up to $1,000 per piece of jewelry and we cover collectibles, but only up to, they put what’s called special limits of liability for your stuff. So if you have certain things that are very valuable, you probably need to get a separate policy for those.

Dylan Silver (06:46.806)
Hmm.

Andy Rouhafzai (07:05.184)
And then the third bucket of coverage is usually known as additional living expenses or ALE or loss of use. If it’s a rental property, I typically recommend having at least two years for that coverage and enough money there to make sure like, if it’s your primary house, if your house burns down, I’ll put it this way. You’re not moving back into that house within one year. So two years is about what I recommend. And then if it’s a rental kind of the same thing, right? Do you want continuous, you want.

Dylan Silver (07:26.134)
Yeah.

Andy Rouhafzai (07:33.26)
to receive money while your house is uninhabitable, getting repaired, or do you not want to receive money? And so I always recommend having ample coverage in the loss of use section.

Dylan Silver (07:41.717)
I think there’s a lot of times where houses may become temporarily damaged in some variety, specifically if you talk about high wind.

or you know, even like a fuel or some type of issue on the premises where maybe you don’t have electricity or what would be considered enough of an event I would say for an insurance company to pay out? Like for instance, if you’re without electricity for a while, you don’t have AC and you have to go elsewhere, is that an insurance event or is it like that’s never gonna happen?

Andy Rouhafzai (08:13.504)
No, so that’s an excellent question. Now, the insurance companies will never volunteer coverage. So typically what I recommend is if you believe that your house is uninhabitable and you have luckily a little bit of cash flow just to go out and get a hotel room and send the receipt to the insurance company, because if you sit around and wait for them to approve it, they almost never will. Their favorite line will be, it might be uncomfortable, but it’s not uninhabitable. However, what I have been led to believe through everything that I have read is,

Uninhabitable generally is defined as you have to have at least all four walls and a roof and you have to have basic utilities, air conditioning, running water, kitchen, place to wash your clothes, et cetera. The thing is, is this additional living expense coverage usually is hundreds of thousands of dollars governed by like two sentences in the policy. And it’s like, if your home becomes unlivable, then we will pay for the additional necessary living expenses or the additional living expenses.

necessary for you to maintain your normal standard of living. And I always hang my hat on normal standard of living. The way that you live your life, Dylan, is different than the way that I live my life, which is different than the way that my neighbor lives their life. And so what is important, like, so when this happened to me, I was like, well, hey, I, me and my wife, we work from home. I have two dogs, I need a fenced in yard. you know, I need a blackout curtain. you, you, you, whatever is important to you is what they should pay for. They will never volunteer coverage.

Dylan Silver (09:23.735)
All right.

Andy Rouhafzai (09:38.178)
They will almost always try to tell you that you can stay at your house. Like if your air conditioning is out, I would say your house is unlivable, especially in this Texas heat. They’ll say, no, no, no, no, it’s uncomfortable. Just stay there. And maybe if you push hard, they’ll say, just get a temporary air conditioning unit and we’ll pay for the rental. They will always try to keep you in your house. But that’s coverage that you have available that should be accessible to you.

Dylan Silver (09:44.789)
Yeah.

Dylan Silver (10:00.767)
And so once you get the receipt, you send it off to them? Are they likely to pay you? How does that work?

Andy Rouhafzai (10:07.116)
Yeah, if you have the cashflow and you spend the money, that usually becomes what’s known as PWI, paid when incurred. Because at the end of the day, insurance comes down to the central principle of insurance is the principle of indemnification. You’re not supposed to make money. You’re not supposed to lose money on an insurance claim. But if you spend money, that definitely needs to be paid back to you. It’s no longer like we’re arguing in abstract. It’s this happened.

You performed what you believed to be the best decision given the information at hand. Disaster struck, you thought you needed to live somewhere else. you know, I had a guy, his house maybe you could have argued was livable. He had a small fire. He has five kids. There’s like VOCs and charred materials running through the house. So maybe you would have stayed in the house. You’re like, I’m a single guy. I stay in the house. That’s fine. You got five kids and an infant. I’m going to get the hell out of the house, right? That’s where that normal standard of living comes into play. I have another situation where like,

Dylan Silver (10:56.001)
Yeah.

Andy Rouhafzai (11:00.984)
There’s a pipe burst and there’s water, there’s drying equipment, dehumidifiers. The people that own the house are 85 years old. So I can jump over dehumidifiers and run over cables, but if you’re on a wheelchair and a walker, you can’t, right? So it’s like a normal standard of living is the key operator here.

Dylan Silver (11:11.755)
Yeah, you cannot do that.

Dylan Silver (11:17.399)
So for folks who are real estate investors, right, and they’re having to deal with some type of hurdles. I deal with a lot of, I talk with a lot of folks who are short term rental, right, Airbnb or maybe midterm rental corporate housing. And there’s some type of issue, which makes it, let’s say, not a good guest experience, whatever it is, right? Now, we’re not talking exactly about,

livable, but maybe it’s something like there’s no warm, you know, hot water, you know, so they have to pay somebody to go fix the hot water heater. Are there is there a way where you could have an insurance policy where then you could recoup money based off of having a you know, a hot water heater type situation thing go out? Or is that just kind of so expensive at that point that it’s kind of like haggling over pennies?

Andy Rouhafzai (12:09.144)
I would say that’s more, that’s probably more like a home warranty issue. So for an insurance claim, generally speaking, at least here in Texas, but I’ve read a lot of other policies, what you need to have is something that happens. It’s usually called, we cover damage that is sudden, direct, and accidental. And the most important one really is sudden, meaning that, you know, let’s say you have a shower pan and the house wasn’t maintained and there’s a slow leak over time.

Dylan Silver (12:12.513)
Okay.

Andy Rouhafzai (12:37.07)
98 % of policies won’t cover that. They’ll say that was your responsibility. You did not maintain the property. So what we need is sudden. Like we need to know that, on June 2nd, a tree fell on the house because of a hurricane level winds or tornado level winds, right? Or June 3rd, the pipes burst in the house. So we basically need a date that something occurred and what the cause was. that’s sudden is the most important piece there of the damage that can happen to your house.

A lot of times, like I said, people will incorrectly file a claim, which inevitably will actually increase your insurance premiums, make it harder for you to get insurance in the future. And so a lot of times we don’t recommend filing a claim if it wasn’t sudden or direct damage.

Dylan Silver (13:12.503)
Mmm.

Dylan Silver (13:21.239)
And so if this is a property which you have a premium that you’re paying on for the mortgage and it’s bringing in income, would the insurance claim cover any of that ever or is it only going to cover the damage and the damage alone?

Andy Rouhafzai (13:34.978)
Well, if you have loss of use coverage, which I do recommend having, then it should also, and the tenant moves out and you had an active lease in place, then they should cover, they should cover the rental agreement that you were already receiving.

Dylan Silver (13:46.187)
Wow, okay, so know, in here and all of this, this is similar to the first time that I talk with, you know, cost mitigation or cost segregation people and tax strategy. A lot of times people will reach out, I’m imagining, to an insurance adjuster when it’s kind of like the 11th hour, like when the trees fell through their home type thing.

But, you know, having that person ready before anything negative happens is probably good. A, so that you can have some type of guidance as far as, is my policy doing what it needs to be doing? And then also B, so that when you are in this, you know, kind of awful situation, like half the house is unlivable fire damage, you’re not figuring out on the fly what to do.

Andy Rouhafzai (14:29.134)
100%. What I would also say to your listeners is, especially if people are buying house, so like if you buy a house and you’ve got a mortgage, the mortgage company is gonna make sure you have somewhat of a decent policy, because the bank owns most of the house, right? But if you’ve got people that are buying houses outright, or they don’t have a mortgage, then there are no rules as to what type of coverage you can get, and this is where I’ve seen people get screwed the most.

Dylan Silver (14:42.827)
Yeah.

Dylan Silver (14:52.502)
Yeah.

Andy Rouhafzai (14:52.558)
So there’s two types of policies. One is called named perils and one is called open perils. Named perils is the worst. So named perils policy says we don’t cover anything unless it’s one of these 11 items. So it’ll say, well, we cover lightning, we cover explosion, we cover terrorism, we cover this, we cover that. And if it’s not one of the things that they say that they will cover, they don’t cover it. Now, most policies that you think about, and if you have a bank on your house, they’ll make sure it’s open perils says we cover everything except these 10 things.

It’s a massive difference. had somebody just recently owned their house outright. They had a named peril policy, a pipe burst in their house. The house was not occupied. The policy doesn’t cover water damage. They lost a quarter million dollars.

Dylan Silver (15:38.66)
Wow.

Andy Rouhafzai (15:38.816)
It’s everybody’s looking for the cheapest policy. And so they don’t, they don’t read the fine print. And unless you ask for it, the insurance company will never actually send you the policy. They’ll just send you the declaration page. The full policy could be 50 to a hundred pages. They don’t send it to you unless you ask for it like five times.

Dylan Silver (15:54.997)
So, pivoting a bit here Andy, are most insurance adjusters, public insurance adjusters, able to guide people and do they guide people before an incident happens? Or is it like most people who do what you do are really only contacted once something bad happens?

Andy Rouhafzai (16:13.142)
I’m only called when something bad happens six months after it happens. And that’s why I’ve been trying to raise public awareness about the option. People, the first thing that happens is something happens to your house. You call your insurance company, then you call a contractor three to six months to a year after when you’ve gotten the shuck and jive and you’re not getting the money that you need. That’s when somebody ends up finding me. and so I’m almost never being called right away. So I have to do like.

Dylan Silver (16:20.513)
Yeah.

Dylan Silver (16:38.197)
Yeah.

Andy Rouhafzai (16:39.17)
damage control and I have to fix the claim sometimes two, three years after the fact. That’s why I’ve been trying to, like I said, raise awareness that there is an option that you don’t have to deal with this on your own. There is somebody out there who does this all the time and that knows all the tricks they’ll play and knows what your rights are, because you do have rights under the policy, under the Texas, under the state laws. And so all of those kind of makes a big difference.

Dylan Silver (16:57.92)
Right. Yeah.

Dylan Silver (17:05.493)
i think i got to add public and insurance adjusted to my list of people that i have to contact you know when i’m getting my first fix-and-flip property or just you know short-term midterm because i i had you know many costs a tax strategy right and now i have to have a insurance adjuster just it’s too much liability because if you get the wrong policy in your up to a fifty thousand dollars you know i don’t know how keen you’d be to do another one of those

Andy Rouhafzai (17:33.272)
Yeah, exactly. mean, it really is just like, you know, even if you don’t call a public adjuster before you have damage, I mean, I would just make sure you have a good insurance broker. Like I said, I don’t sell policies, but I buy my policies through a broker. want them to shop my business around and then just make sure that once you know, like the three to five things to look for in your policy, make sure that you’re that you’re getting, you’re always getting policies that cover those few things.

Dylan Silver (17:56.713)
at given a bit here and the site before happen on you mentioned that you know as difficult as it can be sometimes especially for people who might be going to this first time to to negotiate and communicate with the insurance companies and as high as the premiums are that if we just got rid of the insurance companies right that the state-run ones are are are no better many cases worse right and so at i’ve been hearing and i don’t know how true this is that in some of these areas where

the there’s been massive damage or there’s been lots of flood that it’s very, very, very hard to get insurance. And I’m imagining that in those cases, the state kind of steps in. What is it? What are these situations look like when we’re talking about? Well, the state does it and it’s even worse. Is that like they’re not paying out on claims? What’s the situation like going on with this?

Andy Rouhafzai (18:49.462)
No. So I always tell people, that’s a good question. I always tell people that with insurance, it’s going to be, you either get screwed upfront when you buy the policy or you get screwed when you file the claim. Nobody wants to pay out on your claim like they should. So the issue is with like some of the state run programs or even some of the other carriers, maybe I won’t name them today, but with some of the, some, a few carriers, the, the policy that they sell you upfront doesn’t cover a bunch of stuff.

So that’s actually worse. Now other carriers will say they write you a nice policy and it covers a lot of things. And then you get screwed when you try to file the claim. I’d rather scenario B because there’s something to argue. If you get screwed at the time of buying the policy, there’s nothing to do. And what I mean by screwed is like, I had one policy, he didn’t have any coverage for the personal property inside the house. Boom. There’s nothing for me to argue. If your house burns down, everything inside you get no money for no questions. There’s no arguing.

another one that I saw was, and that Texas is moving to this a lot is instead of replacement cost value for the roofs, cause there’s so much hail here in Texas, they’re moving to actual cash value for a roof, which means that if your roof is 10, 15, 20 years old, they’re like, okay, yeah, you need a new roof. Here’s 2000 bucks. Now go kick rocks. Right. and so if you’re not careful with what you’re buying, they’ll screw you upfront, which means that again, no matter what public adjust you hire, no matter what attorney you hire,

They can’t change the terms of the policy. That’s the contract that you signed. That’s the policy that you bought. So I’d rather see people get screwed on the, on the backend, because at least we can fight those decisions, in, in, at a later date.

Dylan Silver (20:29.247)
Yeah. Man. Something that I think just people aren’t thinking about until it’s too late. I hope they start thinking about it sooner. I know I will be. Andy, we are coming up on time here.

Andy Rouhafzai (20:40.354)
Well, that’s why I tell people just take, the policy and, and throw it I people just like, Hey, take your full policy, throw it in AI and just start asking a few questions. The best way to do like a quick, easy policy review.

Dylan Silver (20:47.467)
asking a question.

It is amazing what you can do with AI. Andy, we are coming up on time here. Where can folks go to get a hold of you?

Andy Rouhafzai (20:58.38)
Yeah, honestly, either my website or Instagram probably where I’m most alive. So website is just insurance claim hero.org. Some bastard took the dot com and then the Instagram is the same. It’s just insurance claim hero.

Dylan Silver (21:16.329)
Andy, thank you so much for coming on the show here today.

Andy Rouhafzai (21:20.546)
Thank you very much for having me, Dylan. I hope your readers or listeners get a little bit and maybe some people get interested in looking at their policies.

Dylan Silver (21:28.865)
Thank you, man.

Andy Rouhafzai (21:30.446)
Thank you. care.