AICPA Insurance Programs

Making a Home Inventory

As a new hurricane season begins, with the destructive storms of 2005 still a recent memory, the importance of creating and keeping a home inventory has become more evident than ever. A good home inventory record is the best way to protect your belongings in the event your home is destroyed in a fire or other covered disaster.

A home inventory helps you to:

• Purchase enough insurance to replace the items you own
• Get insurance claims settled faster
• Substantiate losses for income tax purposes

In order to create a comprehensive home inventory, consider the following:

• Note everything. When making a record of possessions, it is essential to note expensive items such as jewelry, furs and collectibles since they may require additional insurance. But, it is also important to make note of more commonplace items such as toys, CDs, clothing and even towels and linens since the cost of replacing these items can really add up if you suffer a major disaster.
  
  
• Big ticket items. Valuable items like jewelry, art work and collectibles may need to be insured separately. Check with your insurance agent or company representative to make sure that you have adequate insurance for these items.
  
  
• Don't forget your documents. It's important to keep a record of legal documents, such as birth certificates and passports, and financial documents, such as banks accounts and insurance policies. You can also use your home inventory to record information about these papers. Note down insurance policy and bank and investment account numbers along with and insurance policy contact information.
  
  
• Find a system that suits you. There are different ways of making your list. You can write everything down in a notebook, for example. Or you can take pictures, writing information on the back of the photos or downloading information to your computer. If you have a video camera, you can walk through your house filming and describing the contents at the same time.
  
  
• Go digital. Using the free downloadable software, "Know Your Stuff-Home Inventory Software" ( http://www.knowyourstuff.org ) can make the task of creating an inventory simpler, by allowing you to organize your possessions according to the room in which they are located and providing lists of possessions that are typically be found in certain rooms as a prompt. It also has the capacity to store digital photographs so that you can document your possessions visually. To safeguard your privacy, the software and your personal home inventory files are all stored on your computer; it is your responsibility to save your home inventory in a secure location.
  
  With the Know Your Stuff software you can also store digital photographs of important items along with your list of possessions. More importantly, it is easy to update and store a digital home inventory. It takes nothing more than the click of a mouse to add a new possession. And when it comes to storing your digital home inventory, you can easily burn it onto a CD or print out a room-by-room document-either of these can be stored in a safety deposit box or other secure location.

Store and maintain your list. Store a copy of your inventory in a safe place outside of you home-with a friend or in a safe deposit box. (If your inventory is electronic, store it on a disk.) That way you'll be sure to have something to give your insurance representative if your home is damaged. Also, whenever you make a significant purchase, remember to add the information to your inventory while the details are fresh in your mind.