We are regularly informed by our property and casualty insurers of the advisability of maintaining a record of our possessions for insurance purposes. It is usually recommended that we take note of the significant items in a written record, noting model and serial numbers as appropriate and recording the value. It is also further advised that we save our purchase receipts and back up all of the aforementioned steps with a detailed photographic record.  

In an anecdotal poll of our clients and friends in 2014, we figured out that nobody was following this advice. I hadn’t even been that good about following this advice. There were a number of reasons cited. I agreed with most of the reasons. The most significant reason was that it was a pain in the posterior. This was my own personal reason, eventually I got past it.

Given that this is a seemingly important part of the financial planning process, we figured that we should do something about this problem. 2015 featured the roll out of our expanded financial planning capabilities, so this seemed like a good time to tackle the inventory challenge. The first step real step in financial planning is to figure out your current financial position, which is basically a massive inventory of real and paper assets and liabilities. Then you figure out how to protect them.  If we really wanted to help people understand their current financial position, and then to help them protect and grow it, we needed to provide solutions to make their current situation easier to capture.

Our solution was to launch a couple of programs to do just that.   We call it our “KEEPING TRACK” series.

The first item we are releasing in the series is this Home Inventory workbook, with companion spreadsheets for people who want to do it digitally.   Any advisory or financial planning client that wishes to do a thorough home inventory simply needs to drop us a line, or pick up the phone and give us a ring. We will send them a printed copy of this book and a GoPro Camera, microphone, and 16GB memory card. They can have a few weeks to make a video record of their home contents, and make a written record in whatever manner they choose. They can then store these items—the book and memory card--in the safe place of their choosing.

Some people will put these items in a safe-deposit box. Others have approached us for recommendations for fire resistant and burglar resistant safes for homes. We are happy to provide some hints in this area, but cannot claim to be authorities on the subject. We do have access to some folks that can give professional guidance in this area, if desired.   We also have a secure storage vault that our clients can use for digital records, which makes a good backup for these records, which can be rendered entirely private to them. We can provide some guidance on this as well. When they are done, they simply put the return mailing label on the box we provide and send us back the camera. The memory card and book are theirs to keep.

If clients want to do this in a slightly more web 2.0 fashion, we can recommend that they take a look at the following web site and app sponsored by the Insurance Information Institute: www.knowyourstuff.org . We cannot vouch for what happens with the things that get entered into the records there, but the site seems pretty slick, easy to use and well organized. There is also a smartphone app. Presumably they have a fairly anonymous database that you store your data in, but we cannot vouch for it. I would recommend that anybody interested in that app, or in that site do some digging to figure out whether they find it satisfactory. We welcome any research on this. I might actually try to connect with them to see what I can find out.

As a side benefit to doing a personal inventory (from my personal experience—I did one a number of years ago), is that the process gives you an excuse to take a step back and consider how much stuff you have that you don’t really need, and that you don’t really use, and that you could certainly get rid of. You can sell it secondhand, and make some cash to pay for something you really would want and use. You can give more precious items to family and friends that might appreciate them and use them. You can donate things to charity, take a tax deduction and maybe make somebody’s day.   Or, you can start throwing things away that you can’t dispose of in other ways. The things we own can be a drag on us over time. Bigger houses, more cost to move, more cleaning and care expenses, more cost to insure, theoretically. That might make it worth doing even without any of the other added insurance and estate planning benefits.

For a copy of the Keeping Track printed book in PDF format click here:

For Financial Planning or advisory clients who want to take part in the KEEPING TRACK Program, and receive the inventory kit, click HERE and drop us a line and we will get you moving in the right direction