Easiest Home Inventory You’ll Ever Take (and Why You Need One)

If you’ve got a home, you’ve probably got homeowners insurance. And if you’re
a renter, I hope you have renters insurance. My husband and I are two of the few
people I know who actually have renters insurance on our New York apartment. We
got married a couple of years ago, which means that our apartment is full of new
purchases from our registry—expensive to replace, to be sure.

But there is one thing we didn’t do until recently: a home inventory. If
something calamitous ever did happen to our humble abode, from a fire to a
massive plumbing leak, our insurance company would require proof of what we
owned before they reimbursed us. I don’t know about you, but I haven’t been
saving all of my receipts in a fireproof shoebox. And I’ve heard horror stories
about people who had to scrounge through friends’ photos to find the shot that
has their Bose stereo in the background. Eek.

In a perfect world, we’d already have recorded everything we own in a
beautifully detailed list that we’d have stored in three separate fireproof
places. In reality, we found a much easier way to inventory our goods: our
digital camera. Here’s how we did it:

We went room by room. I snapped pictures of each room in our apartment
from several angles to capture all contents.

We opened closets and drawers. We have an unbelievable amount of stuff
stored in cabinets and bureaus, from mp3 players to DVDs to hard drives. We took
a photo of the inside of each dresser drawer and storage space.

We got close-ups of makes and models. My husband loves our flat-screen
television, but I’m pretty sure he hasn’t memorized the serial number.

We also used our camera’s video option. It only takes three-minute
movies, but it saved us a lot of point-and-shooting, and we were able to
narrate.

When we were done, we saved the photos and videos to a DVD (a CD would also
work), then my husband took it to work with him. That way, if disaster strikes,
it won’t obliterate all our hard work—provided it isn’t a really, really big
disaster.

Have you ever lost anything to catastrophe?