Know Your Stuff - Get a Home Inventory

Having a complete inventory of your property, including your home or business exterior, is a smart idea and excellent investment, particularly for those who live in areas prone to natural disaster. Events such as Hurricane Katrina showed us just how bad weather can hurt us in our own back yards. And even if you don't live in the storm zone, Tornado Alley or along a major fault line, having a comprehensive home inventory (and one for your small business) is a good idea. You never know when you could be the victim of fire or theft.

In any of these events, being able to prove ownership of your items and their approximate quality at the time of their damage or loss can be invaluable when it comes to filing insurance claims or police reports.

Inventories can also be useful for estate planning or divorce settlements. And if you're planning on moving, an inventory can not only help you organize your move, but prove the condition of your property before the movers get a hold of it.

You can either do the inventory yourself or hire an inventory service to do it for you. I'll cover performing an inventory for yourself in a future article (although this one should give you a good idea of what's involved). But for now, I'll cover how to locate and hire a service and what the service will typically do.

Hiring a Home Inventory Service

Performing a home inventory is fairly easy, it's just time-consuming, tedious, and requires that you have a camcorder and still camera, preferably a digital model (you can use film, but digital is much easier since you can view your photos immediately and not pay for those you don't want). It's one of those things you might have been planning on doing forever, but it never makes it anywhere near the top of your to-do list. And this is very understandable.