Why You Need To Take A Home Inventory
Disasters and natural calamities can happen anytime. In this case, home insurance companies will be flooded with property claims. If you want to cut the long process short by being prepared, making a home inventory could be of big help.
Home inventory is the act of piling up details of your household to make property claims an easier task to go through both for the homeowner and the insurer. In a way, it is a good method of preparing yourself and organizing even at the face of trouble.
Billions of homeowners file for property claims each year. You can cut the long process short if you are able to secure an updated home inventory that will make it easier for your insurer to take into account whatever you have lost to the calamity. Keeping track of everything would definitely make it easy for you and for your insurer to process the property claim.
The Disasters
For the most part, property claims are applied when natural disasters such as earthquakes, floods, fires, hurricanes, and tornadoes occur. But home inventory may also be useful should minor disasters or occurrences such as theft, water damage, or wind damage take place.
It is not good to expect such disasters but it is equally bad if you face such calamities unprepared. You would not want to be caught off guard. Let us face it: calamities and natural disasters are a given. They can happen to anyone at any point in time.
How to Make a Home Inventory
Creating a home inventory is never a difficult task. It can be accomplished through simple and easy steps. You can start by taking pictures of every part and every corner of the house. Take photographs of your home from the front yard to the rooms to the bathrooms to the kitchen to the basement to the garage. In this digital age, you can produce soft and hard copies of those photographs, which you could keep in different places. You can leave a copy online, in a safety deposit box, and a household safe. This is to ensure that a copy would be accessible anytime you need the home inventory for a property claim.
Of course, you need to ensure that your home inventory including the photographs, the receipts, the itemized belongings, and the spreadsheet would survive any kind of disaster. That's how important keeping a copy that will be accessible online, in any computer, is. Extracting the documents easily when you need it is the whole point of this effort.
Also, you must take note that home inventories should be updated periodically. Every time a home upgrade or home repair or home remodeling is done, your home inventory must be duly updated. This means that you will need to take new pictures of your home, file the necessary documents, and update the spreadsheet.
Remember, a home inventory that will not be available when you need to file for your property claim and which do not bear updated details about your home is completely useless.
About the Author:
Beverly Manago is a freelance writer focused on the real estate industry, and a consultant for My Single Property Websites, a web 2.0 marketing tool that lets real estate agents create stunning virtual tours and single property sites easily. She also contributes to the Real Estate Encyclopedia there.
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