When you think about disaster preparedness, you may picture emergency supplies, evacuation plans, and backup generators. Those things matter. But consider another task that is too often overlooked: your home inventory.

How a Home Inventory Can Improve Disaster Preparedness and Simplify Recovery

After a disaster, your insurer or FEMA may ask you to itemize everything you lost. At first, that seems manageable. You remember the television in the living room, the dining table, and the appliances in the kitchen.

Then the questions start:

• What was in the hall closet?
• How many power tools were in the garage?
• What brand was the washing machine?
• What was the quality of mouldings, fixtures, and hardware?
• How many pairs of shoes were in the bedroom closet?
• What did you store in the attic?
• What paintings hung on your walls and who were they by?
• How many holiday decorations, children’s toys, family heirlooms, sporting equipment, books, jewelry, and collectibles were in your home?

The average home contains thousands of individual items. Trying to remember them all after a traumatic event is a challenge you don’t need.

The Simple Walkthrough Method

Creating a home inventory may sound overwhelming, but if you grab your smartphone and start walking from room to room taking videos, it’s relatively easy. You might want to focus on one or two rooms a day if your home is large. As you’re filming, dictate what you are looking at and note labels, brand names, artists’ names, colors or fabric types, and approximate value as applicable.

If you’re taking photos, you can add information to each digital photo by embedding metadata such as captions, keywords, or brand details using photo software or your computer’s file manager. Or, you may want to write everything down in a journal and paste printed photos next to each description.

This inventory will be extremely valuable if a wildfire, hurricane, tornado, flood, or another disaster damages or destroys your home. Trying to remember all your various belongings can be near impossible, since most of us underestimate how much we have accumulated over the years.

Why Documentation Matters

A home inventory doesn’t prevent a disaster. What it does is help reduce the mental burden that comes with recovery. After a disaster, you’ll be making countless decisions about temporary housing, debris removal, permits, contractors, finances, and rebuilding.

Your home inventory list can help you:

• Support insurance claims.
• Reduce disputes about your loss.
• Identify model numbers, brands, artists’ names, and purchase dates.

Insurance requirements will vary from state to state. Some states have adopted consumer protections that respect the stress disaster survivors are under. If you live in California, for example, and suffer a total loss, you may be allowed to group personal belongings into categories rather than create an exhaustive inventory of every individual item. Some states require your insurer to provide advance payments for personal property losses before you submit a complete inventory.

Documenting your personal property before disaster strikes can help you move forward with greater confidence if the unexpected ever happens.

Download the Home Inventory Guide

Not sure where to start?

Download this Home Inventory Guide to learn the basic items you’ll want to document. Once you’ve created your inventory, keep it in a safe place—a safe deposit box, fireproof file box, or in Cloud storage in a digital file named “Disaster Preparedness” or something else you’ll remember.

Make sure to add new videos or photos to this folder whenever you make significant new purchases.

Taking these steps today can make an enormous difference if you ever face a recovery situation. Consider it like carrying an umbrella to ward off the rain. By having the inventory in place, you will hopefully never need to use it. 

If You’ve Already Experienced a Disaster

If you’re reading this after losing all or part of your home, this advice may have arrived too late for you. But it can still serve an important purpose.

Consider sharing this information with friends, family members, neighbors, and anyone else who still has a home to protect. Unfortunately, many homeowners don’t realize the need for an inventory unless they’re standing in front of a pile of debris, trying to remember what used to be there. Encouraging someone to document their belongings today could spare them the stress and frustration you’re now experiencing.

Preparedness isn’t just about protecting property. It’s about protecting you from avoidable hardship during recovery.