How to Prepare an Insurance Home Inventory

Many homeowners to have no concept of the amount of money they have tied up in the contents of their home. The idea of going through all of your contents and making a detailed list with prices may seem like medieval torture. This is however the best way to provide evidence to your insurance company if those items are lost or destroyed due to a disaster. Your documentation will help to ensure a smooth claim process.

The best way to complete a comprehensive home inventory is to do it in small stages. The first way to "baby step" the process is to prepare a list and the appropriate categories by room. Using a computer for this step will make the process go faster, and it will also allow for easy updates as personal items are eliminated or as new ones are added to your home. To keep things simple, we will focus on the old-fashioned pen and paper method.

By first compiling a list of rooms, you can then create a blank sheet of paper with the name of each room at the top. With an assistant, you can then go through each room and one person will pick up an item while the other person documents a description of the item and the dollar value of that item. Continue this process for each room in the house.

As you go through each room, you may consider dividing the room into separate categories for items like furniture items, clothing items and so forth. Many rooms, like bedrooms, will have very similar categories. This process will help simplify the process and most importantly, it will help to eliminate missed items. You can add even more detail by including separate columns for the item name, its make and model, purchase price, replacement value and whether or not you have any photos of the item.

Photography can be an important tool to prepare your inventory. Try to take several photos from different angles of very expensive or unique items. Video can also be very useful. In particular, a video with your image and voice describing the items will go a long way to suppress any doubts that you did in fact possess missing items in the event that your insurance company was to question your ownership.

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