How to Take an Inventory of Your Valuables for Insurance

When you took out insurance on your home or the contents of your apartment, did you actually do a full inventory to find out what it would cost to replace everything you own?

If you did, you're one in a million: most of us estimated the value of our worldly goods and named a few dozen items we considered valuable, such as jewellery, musical instruments, electronics, Aunt Velma's silver or other heirlooms, and our Wii. We wouldn't dare forget our Wii. Then we vowed to do a full inventory soon, when we have more time.


The Inventory Schlepp

For most of us, that time never arrived, because we thought taking inventory would take a good part of a weekend, and we all have better things to do with our weekends.

That's because, once upon a time, if you wanted to inventory your household possessions for insurance, you had to go through three steps:

• Step 1: Make a list of everything, describing each item and how much it's worth
• Step 2: Take photographs of everything
• Step 3: Buy a fireproof safe, rent a security box at your bank or ask a friend to store the list and your photographs in a safe place, in case your house burns down.

You could still do all that, but it's a LOT of work.

Welcome to the Digital Age

Thanks to the dawn of digital cameras, Step 3 may never again be necessary because we can take digital photographs of everything and store them at one (or more – redundancy here is a good thing) of the many photo storage websites, such as Flickr, Picasa, or Shutterfly.

And instead of storing a physical list on paper somewhere, you can send yourself (and your spouse or a close friend) an email with the list of each item's value, or use software from KnowYourStuff.org. The latter is a website run by the New York-based Insurance Information Institute but their software's free to anyone. The registration form even asks for state OR province.




Video: Cheap and Easy

But now that almost every camera (including cell phone cameras) can take video, the cheapest, easiest, fastest, and least labour intensive way to do an inventory of your stuff is to turn on a video camera and walk from room to room, describing each item and its value while you record its image (and serial numbers on items that have them). You can even videotape the inside of all your drawers. To document the camera itself, just stand in front of a mirror while recording. You may have to hold up the manual or other documentation for the camera to record the serial number, though, because it's probably on the bottom or the back of the camera.

You can even have a friend with a calculator follow you around and videotape the total on the calculator at the end of your video. Then download it to a video storage site that such as YouTube (don't forget to set it to Private) or Vimeo.

It's fast, easy and thorough. No muss, no fuss, and it'll be over so quickly you'll have lots of time left over to play Super Mario Galaxy on your Wii. Promise.


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