Total Loss Home Inventory Insurance Claims is a household inventory list that documents all your valuable and not-so-valuable possessions.
- It can be used if you need to file a home insurance claim that has damaged or destroyed some or all of your personal belongings.
- A personal property inventory list
- It dictates the item’s name, a brief description, the purchase date, and an estimated value with a receipt.
How to Create a Total Loss Home Inventory for Insurance Claims
Permission
Get permission from the fire department to enter your fire-damaged home, and wear protective equipment.
Begin Your List by Room
- Draw a diagram of your home, labeling each room.
- Pick a room and start documenting. Begin by writing down each item by room name (i.e., bedroom #1 or living room).
- Group items like clothes within the same thing. If you have 25 shirts and ten pants, it’s OK to group them instead of writing down 35 different entries.
- Repeat this process in every room of your home until you have documented everything.
Take Photos and Videos
This will prove you owned the items and what condition they were in when you conducted your last home inventory checklist. Using your smartphone to capture photos and videos is sufficient.
Organize Your List by Category
Look through the photographs and create a list of every item depicted, as descriptive as possible (including brand, age, quantity, price, and condition).
Organizing it by category is the easiest and most efficient way to keep track of all your items—group things like work tools, furniture, or household appliances.
TIP! Include the purchase price of each item in your inventory, and include receipts for the original purchase whenever possible. If you need receipts or were lost or damaged, you can get duplicates from the merchants or look up comparable values online.
Use a price-scanning app or websites like wedding registries to find your possessions’ replacement cost values. If an item is no longer available, list the closest alternatives.
Keep Your Home Inventory List Safe
If you physically wrote it down, ensure the list is locked away in a waterproof lockbox that won’t get destroyed if your home does.
Keep all invoices and receipts for items you need to replace for reimbursement purposes.
If you choose modern technology, email the list to yourself or save it to an external hard drive for safekeeping. The quicker you can access your home inventory list after a disaster, the faster you can get your life back to normal.
