If you experience a disaster and need to file a claim with an insurance company, it will be extremely helpful to have a completed inventory of your possessions. After the disaster, you’ll contact the insurance company to report details of the loss – but what will you tell them if you can’t remember what was in the house? If you have completed a home inventory, you’re way ahead of the game! Here’s how you can start:
Take a pen and paper. Find a seat and close your eyes. Now list everything in your home. An impossible task? Consider how hard it would be to do this after your home had taken a major hit in a disaster, and many or most of your possessions were gone.
What Is a Home Inventory?
A home inventory is simply a record of the contents of your home. The record can be in writing, on video, or a series of labeled photos. What’s most important is that a home inventory can serve as the basis for preparing a complete statement of losses if a disaster should strike, helping to get a claim processed more easily and quickly.
The hassle of preparing a home inventory will be more than worth it if you ever experience a significant loss. For more information, review our disaster preparation guidebook.
Great post and such an important topic! Not only do I offer both a home inventory service where I come to people’s homes and create their home inventory for them, including receipts and other documentation in a professional catalog that can be updated periodically, but I created Home Inventory Academy for just this purpose. It’s an online, self-paced course for do-it-yourselfers that takes people step-by-step through the process, including teaching them how to use a smartphone app to take the pictures safely and securely.
Hello, Carol. What a great service to offer!
Word of warning though. If you have your inventory in video form on your phone don’t lose it. You may want to erase and store elsewhere. Thieves would love to have the information!