Have you ever went around your home and tallied up how much your possessions are worth? Yeah me neither. I keep saying that I should, but I never do.
We both should do this as soon as possible.
Why? If there’s a fire in your home and need to place an insurance claim (such as after getting your home insured with HBF), you’ll be able to show the insurance adjusters, more or less, what you lost.
If it’s Laziness stopping me from documenting everything, I need to stop living up to my name. When I first wrote about emergency preparedness back in early 2008, I mentioned digitizing your media and uploading them to the Internet. At the time, no one had heard of Android and the Flip video camera craze was just starting to gain interest. Today, it almost everyone has access to a video camera (if even on their smartphone to record a video tour of the house. It probably would take 10 minutes to get most of the big stuff.
If there’s any difficulty it comes with the little things. For example, flipping through my sports card collection certainly takes some time. Women might find that documenting their jewelry is the same way. Fortunately, the 80/20 rule applies here… 80% of the value of my card collection are in only 20% of the cards. Okay, I lied. It is probably closer to 99.9/0.1, but people are more familiar with the 80/20 rule.
Once you have the video, you should upload it to a video to a cloud service. A memory card with a video of your stuff is no good if it is charred to smithereens in a fire. A private YouTube should do the trick. If you are technical-minded and want to pay a few pennies for you could use something like Amazon’s Glacier (which has “annual durability of 99.999999999%”), but it will cost you a couple of dollars a month depending on how much data you have to upload.
With video evidence, it’s not just my word that I lost a Kevin McHale rookie card in a fire… it’s very good proof. Now, I just have to resist the urge to look it up and find that it is only worth about $3.