insurance riders for your valuables

« Back to Home

Have A House Fire? How To Handle Remembering Your Personal Property

Posted on

If your home recently burned down from a house fire, one huge part of your home insurance claim is going to be your personal property losses. You will have lost everything in the fire, and figuring out what you had for the insurance paperwork will be a challenge. Here are some ways that you can accurately document what you lost.

Remember as a Family

One technique is to try to remember what you had in your home by meeting together as a family. You will need to visualize each room in your home. Start on one wall of the room, and then start listing everything that you remember being in it. You'll need to list everything that was in the home, and while this is a very time-consuming process, it can produce some accurate results. As long as you work systematically, you'll be sure to list as many things as you possibly can.

Document Items

Sometimes fires do not burn the home down completely, but they cause a lot of damage to the home. This gives you the opportunity to photograph items as they come out of the house so that you can sort through the pictures later. As items as items are being thrown into the dumpster, snap away, and try to get as many pictures as possible. When combined with other techniques, this may help you remember things you would have otherwise forgotten about.

Go Through Old Photos

If you stored all of your photos in the cloud of on your smartphone, you may have enough photos to piece together what was in your home. Browse through the photos to try to jog your memory and put together a list of items that you see within each room. Compare to what other members of your family have come up with.

Let an Insurance Adjuster Handle It

If you do not have the time to document every single item that was in your house, you can leave this job up to an insurance company adjuster. They will use estimates based on previous claims to determine what you had in your house. Assumption are made about the value of items, and your policy does allow you to replace everything with a new item of similar value, so it should be enough to cover all of your essential items in the home.

For more tips on dealing with a personal property claim, speak with a local insurance agent.


Share