1835: Highest Interest Rates In The World, Make Money With Insurance Claims Part 2

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Welcome to the Creating wealth show with Jason Hartman. You're about to learn a new slant on investing, some exciting techniques and fresh new approaches to the world's most historically proven asset class that will enable you to create more wealth and freedom than you ever thought possible. Jason is a genuine, self made multimillionaire who's actually been there and done it. He's a successful investor, lender, developer and entrepreneur who's owned properties in 11 states, had hundreds of tenants, and been involved in thousands of real estate transactions. This program will help you follow in Jason's footsteps on the road to your Financial Independence Day. You really can do it. And now, here's your host, Jason Hartman with the complete solution for real estate investors.

Well, this should be fun today.

Welcome to episode 1835. 1835. And hey, guess where I am. If you're watching on video, you see that I am in the back of one of my favorite vehicles. Yes, I'm in Salt Lake City, and when I landed at the airport, I got to pick up this awesome rental minivan. Yes, now I know I'm going to tell you something about myself. Dear viewers and listeners. The minivan is my favorite car.

I know. I know what you're thinking. Who is this nerd? You? Yes, I know I could have Ferraris, Rolls Royces.

Lamborghinis, whatever. I can afford them all. But I think the best vehicle configuration ever is the minivan. I kid you not. I mean, look how awesome this is. I'm in a Chrysler Voyager. And what a great rental car. In fact, I'll tell you, when I first moved to Florida almost four years ago, and my BMW was still in Las Vegas waiting for the truck, the shipment truck, to pick up the bm, bring it to Las Vegas. And they tried to, of course, screw me around because everything in the world has become a scam, right? And, you know, first they told me, well, it'd be twelve hundred dollars. And then they tried to jack me around and tell me it's 14 or $1,600. And I just said, no way, I'm going to report you to the U.S. department of Transportation. And somehow they honored the original price. Imagine that. Yeah, it's unbelievable. Anyway, but I rented a minivan when I landed in Fort Lauderdale, when I first moved to Florida. And I had that minivan for about 10 days before my BMW arrived. And I remember as they were backing the BMW off of the the truck or the hauler truck. I thought I'd really rather keep the minivan. I know you're thinking I'm a total nerd, right? But it's just such a comfortable. I mean, the dog loves it, I love it. I think it's great. I don't have to impress anybody. Anyway, so here we are in the back of a minivan and I am recording today's episode. So got some things to share with you. And we got to talk about mortgage rates a little bit more. Mortgage rates, super important. I know all of you are freaking out and you've got, you've got the FOMO situation going. Or is it called FOMO when you already missed out? It's not the fear of missing out, it's the fear that you missed out. Maybe we'll make a new acronym for that one. Hey, send that to me. Go to jason hartman.com ask and send me your new acronym for that. Not the fomo, but the actually, you missed out. And you know a lot of us did, right? The low mortgage rates are gone. Maybe they'll come back. You know, kind of like that ex girlfriend or boyfriend you want back, right? Maybe they'll come back. Probably not, but it's possible. So that's what's happening with mortgage rates. So let me flip the screen here and show you a couple of things on these mortgage rates. And I've got to blow it up. So it's big enough for me to see. But we talked about this on Monday's episode and that is if you look at the amount someone can afford versus what they used to be able to afford. So In February, at 3.76%, think of how recent that is. This 30 year fixed rate mortgage. The consumer house buying power back then was $442,000. At 5%, it's now knocked down to 381,000. And at 5.5, it's knocked down again to $361,000. So of course the low information economist and the low information gurus out there and predictors and prognosticators of doom, of course they see this as some linear thing because, well, they're just not that smart. And it's just not a linear thing. They don't understand the way markets work. They think, well, gee, now that that person can't afford the $441,000 house, the market's gonna collapse, it's gonna crash. And by the way, there are some very small signs of slowing. We even got another one of those signs yesterday. And as these Increase and, and you get more of these signs. We will of course, share those on upcoming episodes. But yeah, there's a little bit of this around the edges that is concerning. But hey, that's not a concern to me. I would love, as I have said publicly numerous times, I would love to see the market cool off a bit. This market has been extremely difficult for us to operate in, and so a cooling market would be a welcome change. Now listen, let's not over cool it, but let's cool it a little bit. That would be my, my wish. So it's not the same buyer necessarily that is affected by this and people simply accept less. That's what they have to do. Look at, everybody wants more and better. I mean, except for me. You know, really, if I wasn't single, I would drive a minivan, okay? But I'm single and I have to be kind of semi cool. So I got to drive sort of a, an SUV at least, if not a, you know, really expensive sports car or something. Right? But I am fine with a minivan accepting less, what most people consider less. But most people aren't that way, right? Because they're not as practical as me. So, you know, look, we all want more, more, more, more, right? But you know, the reality is we just can't always get more. So we have to accept what's available to us, right? And that's what happens with home buyers. Okay, so let's look at a little more here. Okay, well, no, before we do that, I got to tell you. So I spoke at the Clever Summit a couple days ago and it was just an incredible time. But my upcoming thing is I am flying back to Las Vegas to speak at fund launch Live. That's going to be a great event. And then after that, I go home for a couple of days and fly out to Dallas to speak at Investor Fuel Mastermind, of course, the Collective Mastermind, which is the mastermind I run with George Gammon and Ken McElroy. And then I'm also speaking at Market Disruptors Live. So if you are at any of these conferences, I know that many of you are because you've already told me. So, you know, meet up with me. I'd love to meet you in person and, you know, shake hands or in the COVID era, do the fist bump. And I will look forward to seeing you there at some of those things also. And I've got a couple other charts before we get to our guest today and we continue our discussion on making money from insurance. Yes, you can make money from Insurance. But let's announce our winners of the 50Amazon gift card for last week. And our first One is a YouTube comment. Remember, two ways you can win two winners every week. One, just make a comment on any of my YouTube videos and we pick those at random. And then also write a review on Apple podcast. Okay, so this comment was by C. CTRS folks. Where do you come up with these, these handles, these names? Ctrs. Well, anyway, CTRS wrote and I guess they were replying to either what I said in the video or someone else's comment on the thread. On the contrary, it is becoming politically unpopular to have home prices so high even among homeowners because they can't move up in house. I don't know if I exactly agree with that. CTRs because they're just trading equity. And that's by the way, one of the other very deceptive things. When you are listening to these different prognosticators of where we're going, right? This is one of the deceptive things. They look at things and this reminds me of where I used to live. Newport Beach, California. A very rich place they called it. That's in Orange County, California. You know, there are and seven TV shows at least about Orange county, the O.C. laguna Beach, Newport High. You know, all these TV shows about Orange county because they call it Orange on the Riviera, right? A very nice, very expensive place to live. And here's the deception about that. When you listen to people talk about housing affordability. Well, housing affordability doesn't matter very much when you're in a. An expensive market like Newport Beach, California or one of the many other expensive markets around the country. And why is that? Well, it's because the theory of relativity applies. The theory of relativity as it applies to real estate, right? Not Einstein's equals MC squared, but Hartman's theory of relativity as applies to real estate. What does that mean? What am I saying there? Well, in these expensive markets you can have people that don't make very much money, but they bought a home in that market years and years ago and they can afford to move because all they're really doing is trading equities. So they can be a secretary, they can have a low paying admin job, school teacher, whatever. A lot of people with jobs that don't pay very well can still live in these expensive areas because they bought into that market a long time ago and all they're doing is trading equities. They buy one house, that house goes up in value. They sell that house, they buy another house. They've got a lot of equity to trade and move and so they're keeping the amount of their mortgage relatively low as they are moving around in that expensive market. So if you look at the housing affordability index and you say, gosh, the people in Newport Beach, California can't afford anything, so the market's going to crash, you would be mistaken. A lot of blind spots there. And that's why you got to peel back the onion to really understand what's going on in these markets. And even Nobel laureate economists. I won't mention Robert Shiller's name Case Shiller Index. They have a lot of blind spots, folks. And I've pointed those out on prior shows. So you gotta, you gotta pay attention to that. But anyway, CTRS, you won folks. You got one month. To claim your prize go to Jason hartman.com ask. And for the Apple podcast reviews, we got V I E P E 33.

VP. I don't know. Anyway, whatever. Anyway, you won. Congratulations folks. Get some more clear handles on your name so we can know who you are. A little better. Anyway, 5. 5 stars. Compared to what? Oh, that's good. You're using my teachings. Compared to what? The five star rating is cool, but only when you ask yourself the million dollar question. But compared to what? Compared to a bunch of other real estate shows. This dude is a beast. I'm a beast. Okay, I'll take it. He knows his numbers and thinks outside the box. I own a bunch of real estate and have been doing this for 20 years and this cat puts me up on game. I love it. This cat. Okay, I'm a cool cat. Thank you. Thank you for the review. Go claim your prize@jason hartman.com ask. You got one month, folks, so claim your prize. We really appreciate your reviews and your comments, so thank you for those. Okay, here's a chart of hysterical historical mortgage rates. Or if you're a feminist, you'd have to say her storical. Not his storical. It'd be her storical. Okay. Anyway, yeah, so you see how woke we are. Hey, by the way, Elon Musk wins Empowered Investor of the year for buying Twitter. Thank you, Elon, for supporting free speech. The first thing you need to do is give Trump and Peter McCullough, who by the way, is speaking at our upcoming Dallas Collective Mastermind event, give them back their Twitter accounts and let them speak freely and stop the suppression of information. Whether it be rigging of the election or talking about vaccines or whatever it is. Everybody should have a voice and the Market, the marketplace of ideas should decide who wins and who has the truth. Not some corrupt political woke bought out corrupted science. Trance, the science, trust the science. Well, what do you think? You can't buy a scientist just like you buy a politician. Of course you can buy a scientist. Don't you watch billions where they buy the scientist out? I mean, of course you can buy a scientist to say anything you want, just like you can do it for a politician. You know, it's. Everything has become a scam, folks. Everything's become a scam. Anyway, all time low mortgage rates on this historical 30 year mortgage rate chart from 1975-19 or to 2022. Right. All time low was January of 2021 at 2.65%. Now, since then we've had very significant.

What?

Inflation, of course, very significant inflation. And since then we have seen interest rate increases to try and combat inflation. Right. That's a normal response by the central planners like Jerome Powell. But what else have we seen? We keep seeing the rate of inflation accelerate and the mortgage rates accelerate. And inflation, that rate is still outpacing mortgage rates. So what does that mean? Not only are you beating inflation by borrowing below the rate of official inflation and dramatically below the rate of real inflation, but you're also beating it on the pacing. The acceleration of the two. The mortgage rates are accelerating at a much lower rate than the acceleration of the inflation rate, at least so far. So you're still, as Charlie Sheen would say, winning. Yes, you're winning. Okay, now this is interesting too. Let's look at interest rates around the world and this chart. One of you listeners sent this to me, by the way, and forgive me, because I can't remember who, but I, I really appreciate it. Feel free to send us stuff. You know, we'll talk about it on the show and we'll try to remember to give you credit. But even if we don't, we appreciate you. We appreciate all of you. So this one was highest interest rates around the world. You know, I remember when I was a kid, my aunt, not aunt Joan, who you've heard on the show, this is another aunt, Aunt Jean. Yes. My grandparents like to give all their kids names that started with J.

And I guess that's passed down because I got the name started with J too. Hmm. Funny thing about that. Anyway, I remember my aunt and she was talking about investing and I was a little kid and I didn't understand any of this stuff, but she was talking about how she was putting her money in Mexican banks. Yeah. In Mexico. And These banks were paying a very high rate of interest. Forgive me, I cannot remember the interest rate offhand. I'll try and think about that. But it was a very high rate of interest. And you know, I was thinking, gosh, you know, I was a very financially savvy kid. I was very money conscious, always very interested in investing, really, ever since I came out of the womb. In fact, probably in the womb, I was into it too. Listening to podcasts back then.

And I remember her talking about these really high interest rates. I remember hearing her talk to my mother about it. And then my real estate agents, Johnny, another J name, he was Persian and, well, I guess he's still Persian now, but he was Persian then too. And he would go back to Iran and visit his family periodically, a couple times a year. And I remember him talking about how the Iranian banks were paying 26% interest. Now, this was several years ago, but he was talking about the really high rates of interest they were paying. And I didn't understand this as well as I do now either. And I thought, wow, is that an opportunity? Could I invest in a Mexican bank or Iranian bank? Would I trust it? Would I lose my money? Yada, yada, yada, right? But the reason they were paying such high interest rates is because their inflation rate was higher than the interest rate they were paying. So they would make money on the margin, right? So if you look at these countries on the chart here, and for those of you only listening, I'll read them if you're not watching the video. Zimbabwe. In Zimbabwe, the interest rate, the short term interest rate is 80%. Yes, you heard that, 80%. In Argentina, it's 44%. In Yemen, it's 27%. In Angola, it's 20%. In Liberia, it's 20%. In Iran, it's 18. In Ghana, it's 17. Haiti, 17%. Russia. Hey, Russia. We all know about Russia. That's in the news lately. 17. In Uzbekistan, it's 17. So the interest rate is only a comparison to the inflation rate. How fast is your money getting debased versus how much interest are you earning on the money? I know this sounds simple to all of us because we get it because we are high information investors. But most people in the world are low information investors. And that's why it's so important to just keep talking about this stuff, to reiterate it, just so we really, really clearly understand it. Okay, last thing before we get to our guest. Come join me in Jacksonville. Go to jason hartman.com wholesale. We're really excited about this first of its kind event where we are going to use some great software tools and some great in the field experience and people will literally buy properties at this event and make money on the spot. So I think it's going to be a really exciting event. Join us in Jacksonville. Go to Jason hartman.com wholesale Jason hartman.com wholesale. If you're watching on video, that's at the bottom of your screen and we will look forward to seeing you there. And let's continue our discussion about making money on insurance or at the very least getting the full value of your insurance policies. So here we go back to our guest, Galen Hare. He was on Monday and he's on again today to talk about this very, very important issue. So here's Galen.

So that's a great example where the payout was only 1400 bucks, 1500 bucks. But we actually saw that claim as being far in excess of our $75,000 threshold. So you don't need to be it's not that you should look at what the carrier pays you. You should, you should just let someone like us look at it and we'll tell you if we think it's big enough for us to help with. You know, the only time it's probably not going to be big enough is someone that, for instance, had a fence blowdown and that's it. And they're confident there's no damage to anything. But there's a lot of damage you don't see on your homes or your commercial buildings. And that damage seriously, seriously adds up. You know, on the bigger claim side, we had a church where the carrier would have sworn up and down. There was about a million dollars worth of damage. And by the time we were done, we were able to prove over $11 million worth of damage. And that we handle cases in that eight figure range often. And you know, it typically starts the case starts in the six figure range, not the eight figure range.

Yeah. And what should someone do if they have a claim that's actually smaller where you're not going to take it, but they feel that they're getting the short end of the stick with their insurance company? What should they do? Yeah.

So the first thing is they should definitely talk to a public adjuster. I would 100% do that. I would also consider finding a contractor that works on insurance claims. I actually don't recommend using them for bigger claims. But these contractors can kind of work some of the smaller claims and they work them aggressively. And what they do is get you to sign a contract that Basically says, hey, you give me the insurance proceeds, I'll do the work. So they become inherently vested in the outcome. And if it's a smaller claim and there's not much to do, but you want your house fixed because you've gotten the short end of the stick, they will work their butts off to fix your home.

I'm kind of surprised that they can do that. You know, I had a couple of roof claims last year, and I was quite satisfied with the outcome, actually. I mean, these were roofs that would have needed replacement anyway, or at least in the near future. And it's like my insurance company paid for a bunch of something I was going to have to do anyway in the near future. So, you know, you really can make money off of insurance. And I'm not saying that in a way of, you know, taking advantage of the insurance company. I mean, I didn't even really negotiate with them. They just paid me out. And I was actually quite pleased with the results on these. But, you know, maybe I should have hired a firm like yours and those would have been bigger.

Yeah. It's kind of funny. I feel like the, the jaded part of me when I hear you say things like that, I start thinking, I bet they didn't replace his decking. And, you know, I bet, I bet they don't have the right underlayment. Right. And I start thinking about all the things.

Right. You know, I'm thinking about that too now. Yeah, but. But you know, I was surprised when one of those roofers pitched that idea that you're mentioning to me, that they would get part of the claim, and I'm really surprised they're allowed to do that. That's. I mean, that's such an obvious conflict of interest. Right. For. And I'm sort of taking the insurance company's side now, but it just doesn't seem right. I'm surprised they're allowed to.

Yeah. There's two schools of thought, right. So there is a. An active effort in most states to try to buy the insurance carriers to stop these assignment of claims or assignment of benefits. Right. And the theory is they lead to more insurance fraud and they ultimately cost more money. The countering school of thought, though, is that at the end of the day, the contractor knows what a fair price is to do the work the contractor is doing. So let the contractor do what the contractor does, because who. The person that probably doesn't know what a fair price is is the homeowner. And then similarly, when we think about adjusters, most adjusters are Very poorly trained, and they're using computerized pricing software. Again, no contractor is actually reviewing this stuff. So the idea is a contractor that does, you know, 5,000 residential roofs a year or more and more is probably in a better place to figure out how much it's going to cost to replace that architectural shingle roof appropriately. And maybe they should be the ones to pick the price. Now I get the other side, which is if it drives up insurance costs and it drives up premiums and it makes it less palatable to be there. The parade of horribles. But there are two countervailing schools of thought, and I think they both have merit.

Okay, all right. Good, good. What else do you want people to know?

One of the things I talk about a lot with people is insurance fraud. And I think it's really important for people to know, because insurance fraud happens on both sides. And if I was giving someone a piece of advice, if they called me up and said I had a claim, I don't want to hire you, but what should I know? I would say, do not commit fraud. Do not lie. Tell the truth. Yeah, well, you know, interestingly enough, 24% of consumers are willing to pad a claim if it's an insurance claim. Interesting. They might be the most honest people in the world, but they are willing to pad a claim if an insurance company is going to pay for it. Right. So it is rampant when carriers say it's rampant. But what carriers don't tell you is that carriers also commit fraud, and people carriers hire commit fraud. The definition of fraud is simply making a misrepresentation.

To try to get or not pay insurance proceeds. It's very straightforward, and it works both ways. It happens on both sides of the fence. But you only hear about consumer insurance fraud because most insurance fraud prosecutions are referred by something called a special investigations unit, which is housed inside of a carrier. Carriers do not report themselves for fraud. Go figure, right?

Imagine that.

So I'm actually part of a group called the American Policyholder Association. And one of the things we do is investigate insurance fraud committed by carriers and make referrals to prosecuting authorities when we identify them. And we've done some cool things. We found mass copy and paste on engineering reports. We found mass copy and paste on wind denials where, you know, someone will say, oh, the wind wasn't high enough to cause damage. And then we actually would find in a letter, by the way, copy and paste this into all of your Hurricane X claims. And then we find out later they didn't know the wind you know, so you see things like that and so be aware is. I guess what I'm saying is when you go through a claim, protect yourself, Record calls if it's legal in your state to do so. If it's not, make sure you follow up every call with an email. Document everything. And that's the way you ultimately protect yourself if you do need help.

You know, it is really ridiculous, and this is just a general statement that these corporations get all the rights of people, yet none of them ever go to jail. It's just disgusting. If an insurance customer, if a policyholder commits insurance fraud, they could go to jail. Right. But if an insurance company commits insurance fraud, you know, maybe they get a fine if you're lucky. You know, these corporations are abusing the planet and nobody ever goes to jail. It's just disgusting that they have all the rights of people, yet they don't get the punishment of people. It is absolutely appalling that our society works this way.

Correct. And look, I'll tell you this. When an insurance company commits fraud, it causes divorce, it causes homelessness, it causes suicides, it causes suicide, it causes joblessness and suicide. And in fact, they did a study after Hurricane Sandy and it was something crazy, like over 30% of children were having some kind of learning or developmental disability. If that family had been a victim of the hurricane, well, that's because they had been underpaid and they have been living in these terrible conditions. And the kids have not been able to get their feet on the ground and really start to develop the way we want them to so that ultimately in that region will affect the entirety of the population in another couple of years because those people will be hitting the workforce and they have not had a fair start as children, which is just terrible.

Yeah. Maybe they end up in prison or whatever. They turn to a life of crime. Yeah, it's absolutely. The processional effect of, of some of these things is just shocking. One other question I want to ask you, Galen, before you go, is what are some of the things that people might not know are in their homeowners insurance policies? And remember, you're definitely talking to owner occupant homeowners, but you're talking mostly to investors that own rental properties. What are some of the things their policy might cover that they don't even know about and they never would think to make a claim for? And then the second part of that question is, what other additional coverages should they consider buying, adding on to their policy that maybe wouldn't be included, but would Be available for a small fee. And it amazes me with some of these insurance policies how cheap it is to add some of these additional coverages. Sometime, you know, $26 a year, it's like nothing. And you've got a whole new area of coverage potentially. Tell us about those two things. Things.

So you're an owner occupant. Your deck page is probably pretty thorough. You have your four basic coverages. I hate, hate, hate when I see a homeowner that does not have additional living expense coverage. Often they have waived it. They have signed their life away. I cannot stress enough, make sure you have additional living expense coverage. That is what keeps your family safe after a disaster. Getting paid for your structure, getting paid for your contents, that's well and good and that's important. But having a roof over your head while you were coping with the disaster is so fundamentally important. Other than that, you have some little supplemental coverages that you should look at. You probably have debris removal, you probably have lost food. You probably have all those little things that 500 bucks here, 500 bucks there really adds up. Sometimes there's even like computer loss, like losing electronic files and stuff. You really got to look for those things, but they're there. And again, just, you know, nickel and diming, those things really, really, really adds up. If you live in a place that is susceptible to hurricanes or hailstorms or tornadoes, do not ever, ever, ever, ever sign a wind and hail exclusion. Many insurance companies will offer it to you and they will offer you a very minor and almost insulting reduction in premium, but your agent will tell you it's a savings and you will sign it again. I hate seeing that. I've seen homes leveled that look like pancakes and there is no coverage because they signed off on it. But on the multifamily side, you have a ton of additional coverages, right? Especially if you're investing. And, you know, so first of all, if you're investing in individual homes, what you have looks a lot like a homeowner policy, except it's a landlord policy. So just check that. You know, if it's cheap enough, I'd get your appliances covered, things like that, because those can be big ticket items. If, if most of your, if you're not really diversified geographically, like if you have 40 homes in New Orleans, Louisiana, well, a hurricane, you're going to be replacing 40 sets of appliances. So if you can get it cheap enough, get those, especially those bundled policies where you can put a ton of properties under one policy. That's always a win Just make sure your numbers are high enough. But again like electronic records, business interruption, make sure you have that business interruption or loss of use coverage there.

Yeah. So the loss of rental income, big.

It's huge. Right. Again, if you own 40 homes in a geographical area where suddenly the homes are all damaged, that really, really adds up. Right. And then on the multifamily side, that's like, it's like, it's like a restaurant menu of coverages. Right. And it's not on the deck page. If you have not done yourself the service of reading that entire hundred page plus policy, then you have no idea what is in there. One of the things we do on the multifamily policies is we make what we call a chart of coverages where we literally read the policy from page one to page 50 or whatever, page 150 and we make a chart. This is covered and it's covered up to this amount. This is covered and it's up to this amount. This is covered and it's up to this amount. And that is what we give to whoever is going to do our estimating. Right. Because we want to make sure that they're looking for these things when they're writing. And if you do not undergo that exercise for yourself, you have no idea what you purchased. And there are so many little supplemental coverages that really, really add up, like audio visual equipment, things like that. You know, that's more for commercial buildings, but you need to typically get separate electronics and audio visual coverage. And then finally I would do an umbrella. Just fundamentally, the more properties you can loop into one policy, assuming it's a good carrier, that's cleaner and better for you. Typically simpler deductibles, you gotta make sure you have enough coverage. But then on the liability side you really should have an umbrella that sits over all of that so you're personally never at risk.

Then that's on the liability side. What about these insurance carriers that say they're a non admitted carrier? What does that really mean? What's the significance of that?

Yeah, be careful with that. It means different things in different states. And in some states it means that you do not have the same legal rights if they do not adhere to their obligations under the policy. And that's big. So for instance, you know, using Louisiana as an example because it just came up recently, there's a surplus lines not admitted insurer that cannot be sued. In some courts they also.

Well, Louisiana is weird because you have two systems of law. You have Napoleonic law.

Yeah, we've mine migrated over to the rest of the folks over the years, you know, it is fundamentally rooted in code of law. But these are statutes that the Louisiana Department of Insurance lobbied for so they could get these carriers in. Right. They don't have to answer lawsuits as fast. There are some courts they can't be sued in. And in some states, these non admitted insurers may not be subject to bad faith penalties, which means they have all the incentive in the world to mess with your claim because there will be no repercussions. And that's pretty big. That's pretty big.

And what did you call those penalties?

Bad faith penalties.

Bad faith penalties. That's different than punitive damages though, right?

It's similar. In some states you can get penalties and punitives. In other states, the penalties take the place of punitives. So for instance, in many states you cannot get punitive damages if you get penalties, but the penalties are prescribed by statute. Right. So that's amazing. In Florida, the old rule, it's changed now. It used to be if you could basically prove that they had underpaid by a dollar, you would get all of your attorney fees. Right? So bad faith penalties look different in different places, but there really is. The point is all bad faith disincentivizes a carrier from playing games during the adjustment process and ideally incentivizes them to pay you faster. Now, functionally, economically, it does not incentivize them to treat you better, but you never ever, ever want to incentivize a carrier not to treat you well. Right? So, so think about that when you're dealing with a non admitted insurer and maybe even meet with a lawyer like me in advance, a lot of them will talk to you, especially if you're investing. They'll be happy to meet with you for free. Say, look, here's what, here are my proposals. What would you go with if you were me? Keep in mind, if I lose these homes, I might have to hire you. Which of these policies would you get? And get their help. Sometimes a lawyer that does this work can be your best silent partner in helping you purchase more properties. Because we'll look at what your risk is and where it's headed.

You know, I know this probably varies by state, but what is the statute of limitations on these types of claims? Because someone might be listening to this thinking, gosh, you know, I had this claim three years ago and now that I'm learning all this stuff, I should have hired a firm like yours. But I settled it and I didn't think I got a Fair shake. What is that like? And so not only the statute of limitations, that's part one of the question, but the other part of it is, what if you've already taken some money from the insurance company? Do you still have rights?

Yeah. So the first thing with the statute, it can be as little as a year. It could be as long as, I think seven years is the highest one I'm aware of. Look, in your policy, interestingly enough, it might not be accurate because there might be state law that lengthens that time. But under your policy, we call it the sue us clause. There literally is a clause that often says, like, you know, your right to sue us or time to sue us or whatever. And it says if you sue us, you must do so within X amount of years of the loss. That's a good place to start. But then your state law may modify that a little bit. It typically won't shorten it, it'll lengthen it. Right. If your state statute, prescription or statute of limitations is a year, but the policy says three years, more likely than not, it's going to be three years because the carrier is consenting to that extra time. So that's a great place to start. If you have taken money from your insurance company and now you were sitting here thinking it was not enough, you likely have not waived any of your rights in almost every state, that is what's called undisputed funds. So if you did not sign a settlement agreement or you did not otherwise indicate that you were allowing that to be a settlement of your insurance claim, they will use the word settlement. Okay, it's confusing, and I think it's intentionally confusing, but they call the check a settlement check. But it's because they're settling the amount of the loss. If you did not sign anything saying you agree or otherwise indicate to them that you agree with those numbers, you probably can still pursue your claim. And in fact, most people that come to us have already received payments. And I can think of one time in my career where it has been sufficient to constitute a waiver.

Okay, that's good to know. Good. Okay. Anything else you want us to know and give out your website?

Yeah, sure thing. So if you have any questions, by all means, feel free to contact me. We'd love to talk to you. We're@www.insuranceclaimhq.com. that's www.insuranceclaimhq.Com. and if you need any resources or need to learn anything, we've got a book on the website. You can get that. And it kind of walks you through how to handle your claims.

Good stuff. Galen here. Thank you for joining us.

Thank you, Jason.

You know, Jason, I've been following you for a long time. Ten years ago is when I first saw your course. And I've been investing, gone to several Meet the Masters. And man, I'm telling you, the way that things have played out are way better than you projected. For me personally, obviously it's been, you know, a good six years, but now I'm ready to kick it into high gear. As you know, I want to really build a portfolio that's, you know, four or five times what I have already. My wife and I have 12 properties and I really appreciate the opportunity to talk here. Thank you so much for listening. Please be sure to subscribe so that you don't miss any episodes. Be sure to check out the show's specific website and our general website, hartmanmedia.com for appropriate disclaimers and terms of service. Remember that guest opinions are their own, and if you require specific legal or tax advice or advice in any other specialized area, please consult an appropriate professional. And we also very much appreciate you reviewing the show. Please go to itunes or Stitcher Radio or whatever platform you're using and write a review for the show. We would very much appreciate that. And be sure to make it official and subscribe so you do not miss any episodes. We look forward to seeing you on the next episode.