(NC) Your home is where you store your most valuable possessions – from jewelry, to furniture, to electronics like laptops. Ensuring these things are protected requires home insurance.
Start by looking for the best deal for your needs on a site like LowestRates.ca, which quickly and easily compares the insurance market for you.
Once you’re insured, it’s important that you create an inventory list of what you have in your home. In addition to traditional valuables, you should also consider adding books, fragrances, pots and pans, musical instruments, shelves, rugs and mirrors to your home insurance list.
Once you’ve created a list of the major items you own, it’s important to compile some physical proof that you own these things. This way, if there is a catastrophic event such as a flood or fire, you can easily prove what was in your home so your insurance can replace it. Here are a few ways to do this:
Video inventory: Documenting your possessions with visual evidence is a surefire way of proving ownership. The only downside is that inventory videos can be quite long: you may want to create timestamps so you can navigate your video more quickly.
Inventory app: There are apps out there designed to make this entire process much easier. They include Magic Home Inventory, MyStuff and Sortly. These apps allow you to photograph your inventory and create itemized lists to easily sort through. Some of these apps require you to pay subscriptions, so they’re not for everyone.
A spreadsheet: This is the classic approach. You can do this digitally with Excel or Google files, saving you some time and ensuring your list can exist in multiple formats. You can create lists along with attached receipts to prove you owned everything in your home. However, this is the most time-consuming option, so opt for the other two choices if you want to save time.
