Home inventory lists for insurance claims

Searching on the Internet I found quite a few sites that offer "home inventory lists" for insurance claims that I could print and use as a template to record all the possessions I wanted for each room. These lists come with some common items like televisions and lounge suites already printed on the page with areas for the other information about the item you would want to put down.



These lists also leave open a few lines for the objects you might have that they have not accounted for. Usually there is enough space to record the most basic of items, but mostly just the most important items will be recorded and the smaller items will be left off the list or dismissed as "not as important" as items like your television.



Once you’ve gone through the trouble of finding the correct pages you need and have downloaded and printed them, now starts the daunting task of cataloguing all you have. This is a tedious task, especially if you have been living in a house for a few years and are only starting to catalog your possessions. If you are moving into a new home this will be the best time to record all you have and save yourself from information overload at a later stage. Updating a list of your possessions is very easy if you load the information as you get it instead of leaving it for a later stage. The longer you put this task off for, the longer and more tedious it will become.



The most time consuming task must be having to write down everything. Combing through all your past receipts and files to find what things cost and what their serial numbers were is something that should be done, at least for your most expensive possessions, but it should essentially be done for every item that you care to prove the cost of or wish to keep detailed information of. Once you’ve made a list of all your things and written down all the serial numbers and other information, you then need to ensure you have copies of all your receipts and that you’ve attached then to the forms that you used to catalog them on.



There is one BIG flaw with cataloguing your information on some insurance form you’ve downloaded or even some kind of software that you might have bought and installed on your home computer. If by some chance your house is destroyed by a natural disaster, what happens to all the files and receipts you’ve put together or the home computer with the software on? All that information could be lost just as easy as the possessions they catalog. Of course you could have made copies of all your papers or loaded the software onto another computer and logged everything onto that one too. But I doubt that most people would want to go through this process twice, even if it is "just for in-case". Probably the best solution in these times is to utilize a web based application that is available from any computer. There are a few choices out there, so take your time and find the one that suites your needs.



Capturing all this information is crucial for an insurance claim, and the more information you have on an item the more you can prove its value.