What’s Gotta Stay

We spend a lot of money on insurance these days. Health insurance, car insurance and of course home insurance. If you have a home with a mortgage, you are required to carry a certain level insurance to cover what is currently their asset/liability. I hope none of you reading this have ever had to deal with a major or even minor catastrophe involving your home, but if you have, you know it is not fun in any way, shape, or form.

I have been fortunate to avoid anything drastic that required me to seek a claim on my insurance, but I have dealt with some minor flooding that ruined some belongings in the basement of the rental duplex we were currently living in. The process was downright ridiculous. We had to itemize anything of value we wanted to claim with such excruciating detail that we began to wonder if it was worth even itemizing some of the possessions we lost. Even further, many things were not considered of any value to the insurance company either because they didn’t match their list or we didn’t have enough information. We were dealing with a matter of only a few boxes of things; I can’t even begin to imagine dealing with this on a large scale.

I have known some that have lost their entire homes to large disasters. My sister lost her home to a fire due to faulty wiring. A friend’s brother lost his brand new home in one of the legendary Souther California fires. Another friend lost his entire home in the New Orleans Katrina flooding. It can and does happen. So are you prepared for it?

There are many things you should do to be prepared as a family; but, one of those things most often overlooked is having an accurate inventory of your belongings. This is a must have, and it doesn’t need to be anything special. There are many templates out there you can use, and even some software programs dedicated to this task. Quicken and I believe MS Money include an option to do this within their programs. Don’t put it off thinking you need to find the perfect setup to record the essentials. Just get started now with a simple spreadsheet so you have it recorded.

Start with your electronics, appliances, computers, and large items such as these; then, move on to other items of value such as jewelry, firearms, etc. For all of these kind of item, include a name of the item, short description, model and serial number (if applicable), and if you know it the year purchased. Additionally, if you recall the original purchase price of any item, throw that in too. Most of all, if you don’t have any of this information for an item, don’t let that keep you from getting started or including it on a list. Start with the name of each item and then build from there.

List anything and everything you can. It is better to have too many things listed than not enough. Once you have the list created, store it both on your computer locally (you are doing this electronically, right?) and somewhere out of your home. A list of your possessions doesn’t do you any good if it was stored in the home that burned to the ground, right. Consider storing a copy at work or at a family members house. One easy suggestion is to mail a copy to your Gmail or other hosted free email account. Google does a great job keeping a copy of your records, and they give you plenty of space to do it as well!

Revisit your list every quarter, making any updates as necessary. Hopefully you will never have need for this list; but if you do, you will be very glad you took the time to create it when you did!