Create a Home Inventory

Creating a home inventory is essential for determining whether you have the proper amount of personal property insurance coverage and greatly streamlines the claims process in the event of damage or theft. In this newsletter, we’ll briefly cover how personal property insurance works and then show how to use My Inventory Tracker to create an inventory of your home.

Personal Property Insurance

Personal property insurance is a type of insurance coverage that protects your belongings and possessions in the event of damage, theft, or loss. It typically covers items such as furniture, clothing, electronics, jewelry, and other personal items within your home. Personal property insurance is usually included as part of a homeowners or renters insurance policy. It helps reimburse you for the cost of repairing or replacing your belongs in case they are damaged, destroyed or stolen.

Keep in mind that some policies have limitations and exclusion on certain high-value items such as jewelry and artwork. It’s essential to review your policy carefully to understand these limitations. You may need to schedule certain items separately to ensure they’re adequately covered.

When you purchase personal property insurance, you need to determine an appropriate amount of coverage based on the replacement cost of your personal belongings. Creating a home inventory ensures you have the right amount of insurance coverage.

Creating a Home Inventory

You should gather the following information for each item:

  • Make, model, serial number (if applicable), purchase date and cost.
  • Photos to provide visual evidence.
  • Receipts, credit card statements, or other evidence of cost.

My Inventory Tracker stores your all of this information on your device and automatically backs it up to your private and secure iCloud account. This ensures it’s available across all of your devices and can be shared with family members.

Follow these steps to get started!

Create a Home

Inventory is organized into homes, so create one to get started.

  1. Tap the plus icon to create your first home.
  2. Give your home a friendly name, like “My Home”.
  3. You can now begin adding your personal belongings!
Add Home Create Home Add Item

Add Items

We recommend going room-by-room and prioritizing items of value or importance. For each item:

  1. Take a photo.
  2. Use the Name field to provide a friendly name for the item.
  3. Enter the Make, Model and Serial Number (if known).
Create Item Take Photo Edit Item

Add Details

Use the Location field to organize items by room or place. Tap “No Location” to select an existing location or enter the name of a new location in the field below.

Use the Category field to organize items by category. The app comes preinstalled with a default set of categories which can be customized. Tap “None” to select an existing category or enter the name of a new category in the field below.

Continuing on, you can optionally add Cost, Quantity, Purchase Information and any Notes describing the item.

Set Location Set Category Edit Item Bottom

Add Attachments

Attach receipts, proofs-of-purchases and additional photos of your items under Attachments. Add a document from your device or iCloud Drive:

  1. Tap Add Attachment…
  2. Navigate to the document and select it.
  3. It will appear in the Attachments list and can be renamed by tapping on the file name.
Add Attachment Select Document Rename Attachment

Save, Review and Share

Finally, tap Save to ensure your work is saved!

As you add more items to your home, you can review the total value and category breakdown by tapping on the Report tab.

If you would like to share your work with another member of your household, tap on the three dot icon (…) and then Share Home. From this page you can share a link with collaborators.

My Home Items My Home Report Share

Conclusion

Although it requires some effort to create a comprehensive home inventory, having one will bring you peace of mind and greatly reduce the stress of generating a claim if you’re unfortunately impacted by disaster or theft.

As the old adage goes, better safe than sorry!