I'd like to try a quick exercise with you. Without looking, could you list every item currently in your garage? Your shed? How about your closet? For those of you that tried this (and the 1 person that actually took out a pen and wrote things down), did you remember every item? My guess is that you probably left out a few things. This is where an inventory comes into play.
The point of this exercise is to illustrate how difficult this task is on a normal day, let alone after a claim. If your house burned down tomorrow (God forbid), your Homeowners policy is built to repair and/or replace everything that was damaged. This includes replacing all of the contents, clothing, equipment, and electronics that were destroyed in this hypothetical fire.
Based on my experience working in a claims office, the insurance carrier WANTS to replace everything that was destroyed. However, the problem arises when it is time for you to list all of your contents. As we demonstrated earlier, memory alone is not enough, and therefore we recommend this quick and easy trick:
Take out your trusty iPhone, and take a video while walking through every room of your house. Make sure you go in every closet, and don't forget the garage and basement. It only takes about 5 minutes to make. Then, send this video or save the video in a place away from your house. This exercise is useless if your video goes up in flames as well! So in the event of a large claim, you will be able to pull out this video and just hand it over to the adjuster. Dealing with a large claim is an incredibly overwhelming experience, and so this video will be one less thing to worry about. Finally, the team at Whitford is always there to help make the path to recovery easier as well.
