海角大神

Why do you have homeowners insurance?

The reason is, of course, to protect you in the event of a major disaster. If your house burns down or some other insured disaster befalls you, you鈥檙e going to want to be able to pay off that mortgage and rebuild, right?

Getting reimbursed for the structure of your home is straightforward. What鈥檚 tricky is getting your insurance to pay for all of the contents.

If you can鈥檛 provide a very detailed inventory, they鈥檒l offer you an estimate. Most likely, that estimate will be low. After all, you can鈥檛 remember everything of value in your home, and they鈥檙e going to just assume the essentials.

When I look around our home, I see so many things that I鈥檓 sure I would forget in the event of a disaster. There are lots of little items with significant value 鈥� my card collection, for one. There are also the items that have deep sentimental value, like the painting by my great aunt that hangs over the fireplace or the painting by my great grandmother in our dining room or my oldest son鈥檚 handmade blanket that is his most treasured possession on earth.

If our house burns down, I want to be reimbursed as accurately as possible for everything. I want to be able to replace all of these things to the best of my ability.

The only way to do that is with a thorough inventory.

There are several different approaches to this task.

On one hand,聽you can videotape the contents of your home.聽Go from room to room, recording everything. While this isn鈥檛 a perfect inventory, it鈥檚 a pretty good one, and it doesn鈥檛 take all that long to do.

A much more thorough approach is to聽document everything with pictures.聽Photograph everything of value in your home and document those items. Write down serial numbers of items with serial numbers. In the digital age, this is much easier, as you can do all of this digitally. If you do this, be as clear as possible with locations of the items in your home.

For one-of-a-kind items, an appraisal is probably worthwhile, particularly if it has significant value.

When you鈥檝e collected all of this material, you should store at least one copy in an off-site location such as a safe deposit box at your local bank. This way, if your home is destroyed, you have all of the material for insurance purposes.

This material will ensure that you get an accurate payout in the event of a disaster. Without it, you鈥檒l be relying on insurance company estimates, and those are likely to be low. Protect yourself and do an inventory.

This post is part of a yearlong series called 鈥�365 Ways to Live Cheap (Revisited),鈥� in which I鈥檓 revisiting the entries from my book 鈥�,鈥� which is available聽聽and at bookstores everywhere.聽