Home Insurance Inventory – Detail it with your Digital Camera

If you have made a detailed home insurance inventory, perhaps you have already used your digital camera or video camera to record the contents of your home.  Don’t put your camera away just yet.  Consider this time saver.

Ideally, as you are creating your home insurance inventory list you should enter as much information as you can about your larger, more expensive items.  These details might include serial numbers, manufacturer name, date of purchase, how much you paid, where you bought it, an appraisal amount, etc.  As you can imagine; gathering and entering all of this information can be quite tedious.

The solution is to use your digital camera to record all of these details.  It costs you nothing, other than the disk you will use to back it up; so snap away.  Take pictures of product manuals, product packaging, receipts, appraisals, purchase agreements, the serial number on the items themselves, and whatever else you might have.

In your inventory document, make a note that you did indeed take a picture of the item and write where it will be stored.  Move these pictures immediately to your computer and back them up (on a CD, DVD or other re-moveable storage device).

Here is the important part:  keep the backup disk of these pictures along with the original inventory list in a place OTHER than your home.  Use a safe deposit box, take it work, or store it at a friend or relative’s home.  Obviously, if your inventory information is destroyed along with your home, it isn’t going to do you much good.