Do you document your possessions?

[Frozen Canuck]

Fires and other natural disasters seem to be everywhere recently. There were horrible fires in Alberta a few summers back where people lost everything and were barely able to escape in their vehicles with the clothes on their backs. California has had its wildfires...one of our relatives had the fire come right up to the edge of their house, but they were spared their belongings. Now we have the fires that are burning through Australia. Of course even if you are outside of any of these disasters, there is nothing to say that a flood or fire or other event won't randomly take your home. Good friends of ours had two separate family members lose everything in house/apartment fires a couple of years apart.

A person posted on a different board that I read, stating that she had lost her whole apartment on New Year's Day and that she didn't know how she was going to go about documenting her losses for insurance purposes. She was having trouble remembering things and realized that even items like make-up were going to add up quickly. As part of a response to that, someone posted a link to this Reddit thread where an insurance adjuster responded to how they figure out the value of your life. It was an incredibly interesting read.

Reddit response

Of note, was the fact that if you write something like "toaster" on your claim form, that you will receive the equivalent of a $4.88 toaster from Walmart, but if you (truthfully) claim "High-end Toaster, Stainless Steel, Blue glowing power button" ... you might get $35-50 instead. We had to match all features that were listed."

The second item of note was that most people, while trying to list their belongings post disaster, will just skip over things like the shower, considering it nothing but a bottle of shampoo and a used soap bar, but the writer states that you should list every single mundane thing you own. They then gave an example listing of their own shower as follows:

• Designer Shower Curtain - $35
• Matching Shower Curtain Liner for Designer Shower Curtain - $15
• Shower Curtain Rings x20 - $15
• Stainless Steel Soap Dispenser for Shower - $35
• Natural Sponge Loofah - from Whole Foods - $15
• Natural Sponge Loofah for Back - from Whole Foods - $19
• Holder for Loofahs - $20
• Bars of soap - from Lush - $12 each (qty: 4)
• Bath bomb - from Lush - $12
• High end shampoo - from salon - $40
• High end conditioner - from salon - $40
• Refining pore mask - from salon - $55

Listing all of these details ahead of time, including taking photo or video proof as documentation, seems like it would be a HUGE amount of work, possibly for nothing, but I could see where it could be invaluable if you are ever faced with one of these devastating scenarios. The short version would be to use photos or videos of every cabinet, drawer, and room to help jog your memory of your belongings, should you need it. However, I tried a small experiment yesterday, just to see what kinds of details I could remember about certain objects, and while I could maybe get the basics, I could see where in a relaxed environment (not post-crisis stress), I could likely provide greater detail that may net a more accurate value for an insurance claim. (For example, I know I have a Swarovski crystal snowflake ornament for my Christmas tree, but what was the year/design???) There is a huge difference in value between low-end, smaller sized items and higher end, larger-sized products (think vitamins or medications) or even things like socks (Walmart vs. merino wool from Land's End).

Of course none of this will be useful unless you find a place to store the info you curate into a safe, off-site location.

Does/has anybody do(ne) this? Has anybody (or someone you know) suffered a loss where you could give feedback on what you found useful to have? While I would like to take the, "this won't happen to me, so why bother?" attitude, I think it would be a good project for me for 2020 if I take it in bite-sized steps. Worst case, if I can get through every area, I should be able to wipe out and tidy each cupboard and drawer while I am documenting things.

 

[Ellie008]

Our insurance agent recommended yearly photos of the interior of our house to document belongings.
Never once actually did it....
I have not personally known anyone who lost their home to fire or natural disaster.

 

[barkley]

i have some items inventoried and documented already. some of it is artwork-nothing of immense value but worth a few thousand vs. just being a framed poster print. for those i took photos and they are with the original purchase paperwork in a separate location from our home. the largest inventory i have is of movies, music-records/cd's and books-on a spread sheet b/c it numbers in the thousands and an insurance agent i once had said that the hardest thing for people to remember in a claim situation was titles/editions of items of this type. my adult kid's video games are inventoried as well b/c when you think about it those $50 games add up very quickly. i need to get dh to do his comic books.

i need to do some updated photos b/c while i could remember the furniture, main items in rooms, i would be hard pressed to remember all the kitchen appliances/dishes, all the tools in the tool boxes, all the odds and ends we only use periodically. in the next couple of weeks i plan to pick up where i left off doing this in november and get copies off property (i needed to do a partial inventory for estate planning anyway so that an executor would know what might be of monetary vs. sentimental value).

 

[yoopermom]

This really hit home for me when a friend had a serious fire that was, luckily, contained to her attic where, unluckily, she stored all of her holiday decorations. She's a person who has decades worth of items for multiple holidays throughout the years. Trying to recreate it from memory was emotionally exhausting for her, especially since you know you're not going to get anything for the "Valentine's Day wall hanging Aunt Mary made you in 1978". She also had a ton of collectibles that she could picture in her head, but we had to do tons of research to find out what exactly it was and when it was made. Now as she buys something, she takes a picture of it, scans the receipt and uploads it into the cloud.

I haven't done any of this, but can see how it would be really important.

Terri

 

[ThisIsJason]

We have some things done: electronics, jewelry, major appliances. We really need to do the rest of it. I have riders on the video game stuff I own and that is all documented because it needed to be, plus some of that stuff own having a box to a game and change the cost by hundreds.

 

[Frozen Canuck]

the largest inventory i have is of movies, music-records/cd's and books-on a spread sheet b/c it numbers in the thousands and an insurance agent i once had said that the hardest thing for people to remember in a claim situation was titles/editions of items of this type

I'm dreading the part where I need to document our movie collection and books. I would estimate we have at least 3000 books scattered about the house. Many in our main bookshelf library area, but my husband has shelves of technical books, we have the kids' 6+ shelves of picture books in another area and I have my own books in yet another area. We are also starting to amass quite the board game collection, which would be easier to catalog while it is still sitting at around 100 titles and then updated going forward. Like video games, some of those aren't cheap, and the cost to replace them can be high if it is out of print.

 

[Kogo Shuko]

I do not document everything, however I do have a very sizeable collection *cough* model horses *cough* that's worth a few thousand dollars. I have not only made a document listing them, but it includes pictures of each one, along with dates they were produced, model numbers, and last known value through sold listings on eBay. I have also done this with other collectibles. Whether it be through fire or through theft, things like collections don't look like much when you see just individual pieces, but once you add up the value of everything, it ends up being surprisingly worth a lot of money. At this point, my collection has more value than my car. I don't know whether to laugh or cry! lol

 

[kdonnel]

My only home owners insurance claim was for a roof and the contents of my refrigerator/freezers. Because it was the same storm that both removed my roof and cut the power it was handled as one deductible otherwise the refrigerator/freezer contents would not have been worth claiming against an additional $2000 deductible.

Inventorying the refrigerator/freezers was easy since nothing was actually destroyed, just rendered unsafe after 4 days of no power. I created a spreadsheet of every item I had to toss and attached a value I either guessed at or pulled from the package.

If did make me think I should inventory the rest of my household possessions but thus far I have been too lazy.

 

[SC Minnie]

We took pictures of everything in the house a few years ago. DH was out of work so had the time. It had been many, many years since we had documented anything. We didn't go to the extent of the shower items or even things in cabinets. We did photograph the big things or more expensive things.

 

[mrodgers]

It would probably cost me more to buy the camera to take the pictures than I would get from insurance to replace the stuff, LOL.

I don't have homeowner's insurance anyways. The cost of that would definitely be more than what I actually own.

 

[Cubbiecakes]

We've only documented the expensive stuff for insurance purposes... my spouse's vintage cameras, the computers/tablets/phones, cars, big furniture/appliances, and my instruments ($75k+ worth just in instruments).

 

[OrangeBirdGirl]

We have nothing documented. It seems pretty easy and would probably take less then an hour of time to just go and video everything in the house. Open up all closets and cupboards. Upload it to youtube and make private so only you could see it. If there ever was a complete loss you'd be able to freeze the video on each thing (like a cupboard) and be able to see your exact pots or other high end gadgets vs the cheap thing from walmart. I'm going to add that to my 2020 list of to-dos.