Personal property coverage is usually set as a percentage of your dwelling limit, often 50% to 70%. Most people never test whether that number is right until they have to list everything they owned from memory, under pressure, weeks after losing it.
An inventory fixes that. It takes a couple of hours to build and about ten minutes a month to maintain.
What each item needs
For ordinary items, four fields are enough:
- What it is (make and model if it has one)
- When you got it (approximate is fine)
- What you paid
- A photo
For higher-value items, add the serial number (photograph the plate rather than typing it), the receipt or invoice, an appraisal for jewelry, art, collectibles, or firearms, and any warranty documents.
Go room by room, not category by category
Categories invite abstraction. Rooms force you to look at actual objects.
Kitchen. Major appliances with model numbers, small appliances, cookware, anything built in. Open drawers.
Living areas. Televisions and mounts, audio equipment, consoles, furniture, rugs, artwork, window treatments.
Bedrooms. Furniture, mattresses (more expensive than people remember), clothing by rough category, jewelry, watches, laptops, cameras.
Home office. Computers, monitors, printers, network equipment, desks and chairs, and any business equipment, which may need separate coverage.
Garage, shop, and shed. This is the room people underestimate most badly. Power tools, hand tools, ladders, compressors, lawn equipment, mowers, generators, bikes, sporting goods, spare parts. A well-stocked garage routinely runs $15,000 to $40,000 and is almost never inventoried.
Attic, basement, storage. Whatever you put up there and stopped thinking about. That is the point.
Outdoors. Grills, patio furniture, playsets, trailers, generators. Check how your policy covers detached structures and their contents.
How to photograph it efficiently
The fastest reliable method is a two-pass sweep.
Pass one, video. Walk each room slowly with your phone recording, narrating out loud: “sixty-five inch Samsung, bought spring 2023, about nine hundred.” Open closets, drawers, and cabinets as you go. Twenty minutes for a whole house.
Pass two, stills. Go back for individual photos of anything over a few hundred dollars, plus every serial plate and receipt you can find.
The video is your safety net and captures far more than a list will. The stills are what actually get itemized in a claim.
Items that need special attention
Standard policies cap certain categories regardless of your total limit. Typical sublimits look like this:
| Category | Common sublimit |
|---|---|
| Jewelry and watches (theft) | $1,000–$2,500 |
| Firearms | $2,000–$2,500 |
| Cash | $200–$500 |
| Silverware | $2,500 |
| Business property at home | $2,500 |
If you exceed these, you need a rider or scheduled coverage, and scheduling requires documentation anyway. Check your declarations page for the real numbers on your policy.
Keeping it current
An inventory built once and never touched decays fast. Two habits keep it alive.
- Log purchases as they happen. When a box arrives, photograph the item and the receipt before the box goes to the curb. Thirty seconds.
- Review once a year. Pick a date you already remember, such as a policy renewal, and do a ten-minute sweep of what is new.
Where to store it
Wherever you keep it, it must survive the loss. A binder in the house burns with the house. Keep the primary copy off-site or in the cloud, and make sure someone else knows how to reach it.
It also has to be usable under stress, which means each item is attached to its own photos, receipt, and date rather than scattered across a spreadsheet, a camera roll, and an email archive.