How to create a home inventory for insurance

A home inventory is a documented record of your belongings — what you own, roughly what it's worth, and ideally a photo or receipt to back it up. Most insurers recommend having one; almost nobody actually keeps it up to date, because doing it by hand means opening a spreadsheet and typing out every item in every room, one at a time.

What to record for each item

A useful inventory entry for something worth insuring generally includes:

• A clear description (not just "TV" — "55" Samsung QLED TV")
• Brand and model number, if visible
• Roughly when you bought it, and what you paid
• A current estimated replacement value, not just the original purchase price
• A photo — ideally showing any visible serial number or label
• The original receipt, if you still have it

Go room by room

Working through one room at a time, rather than trying to remember everything from memory, is what actually gets an inventory finished. It also naturally covers the places people forget — garages, attics, basements, and storage closets tend to hold real value (tools, sporting equipment, seasonal items) that never comes to mind when you're thinking about "what's in my house."

Watch for items with their own coverage limits

Most homeowners and renters policies cap how much they'll pay out for certain categories — jewelry, watches, fine art, collectibles, and sometimes electronics or firearms — regardless of your overall coverage amount. These per-category sub-limits are set by your specific policy, so check your actual declarations page rather than assuming your general coverage applies to everything. If a category's real value exceeds its sub-limit, insurers typically offer a separate rider or scheduled endorsement to cover the difference.

Keep a copy somewhere that survives the loss

An inventory that only exists as a notebook in the house it's documenting doesn't help much after a fire or flood destroys the house too. Keep a copy in the cloud, with a relative, or anywhere else physically separate from the home itself.

Update it after you rescan or repurchase

An inventory is only useful if it reflects what you actually currently own. Redoing the whole thing from scratch every time you buy something new is exactly the kind of tedium that makes people quit — updating just the parts that changed is far more sustainable.

This is the exact problem Home Inventory Scanner exists to solve: film a normal walkthrough with your phone, and the identification, categorizing, and valuing happens automatically instead of by hand.