33 Reasons to Take a Home Inventory

Hi everyone, Beth Dodson here with Homes Zada. I hope you're having a fabulous day and I hope you're staying safe. We have a lot of hurricanes that have passed through in this last couple weeks and now we have a lot of fires in the California region and unfortunately we've had some serious, serious situations occur. And so I'm hoping everybody's staying safe and they're also being protected not only just from the fires but from the smoke That continues to billow out and over to other areas in Sacramento and the California area. So, because we're talking about the fires and all these natural disasters, I wanted to talk to you more about why a home inventory is really important, besides just natural disasters, 'cause everybody swears, it'll never happen to me. And generally those things happen. It's just a, it's a really bad thing. So you may live in an area of the country that rarely gets affected by these types of natural disasters, and thank goodness for that. Truly, thank goodness for that. But there's more reasons to have a home inventory. And we're back, technical difficulties. So there's more reasons to have a home inventory. And I wanted to go through at least 33 of them. Yep, 33, that's a lot. There's even more than that. But I wanna take the opportunity to really get in front of having a home inventory because the majority of homeowners don't have it. There's a lot of reasons why they don't. A lot of people think it's really a lot of effort or it's a lot of hard work. Personally, I didn't think so, but I used my phone and walked around with my handy-dandy HomeZada. Oh, that's great. But the amount of inventory you take depends on the amount of detail you want to add into the system. So we're not going to talk about that kind of today, but we are going to talk about some of the reasons why you want to have a home inventory besides these natural disasters. Some of the reasons you want to have a home inventory is maybe you are moving. So when you're moving, you want to make sure that you're documenting everything so that everything that you left one house is making it to the next house. That's one. 2, maybe there's a change in your marital status, whether it's a divorce or whether it's a marriage. You're bringing items together and you're taking items apart. It's really important to understand what you own in order to divide it up if you need to divide it, or even to bring it together and maybe to actually remove items. So sometimes when you come together, you have too many of the same things, and so you have the opportunity to sell it or to donate it and then move into a home together, Or use those pieces for a second home. That's another idea for a home inventory. When you know what you have in a second home, you can know what is in that home. So taking a home inventory of your second home is really valuable because you know what's there. And if ever you need anything, you can just quickly look in your phone or on your laptop and look at what's in that home. So yep, I have plenty of measuring cups or Or I don't have this particular fry pan that I wanna cook this special, special meat, or I left my paella pan at home. So can you tell I like to cook? No, but seriously, there's different things that you can look at when you have a second home. The other thing that you can look at is if you have a rental property. Taking an inventory of a rental property is also very important because you document what is in that rental property prior to renting it out. This you can do as you adjust seasonally, or you can actually adjust the inventory each time someone comes in and out. You can do a quick review. Super simple. But these are really good reasons to have a home inventory. Another good reason to have a home inventory is maybe you're traveling. Maybe you're traveling and you need to know what's in your house, and you're traveling and you see this amazing piece of furniture that you just have to have. But before you ship it home, you need to one, make sure it fits into the room, and make sure it matches with all the other things that are happening. Otherwise, you're stuck with this piece of furniture that maybe you didn't want, and maybe you just wasted a little bit of money. So keep that in mind when you're traveling. Sometimes you find things that you love for your house, and then you wanna place it in there. But that's another good way to take an inventory, 'cause you can see what's in your house. The other thing to do is when you're having garage and yard sales. When you're having garage and yard sales, you already have an inventory of the items, and sometimes you already know what you originally paid for them. So you might be able to leverage some of those dollar amounts in your garage or yard sales, or even consignment. And so that happened to me personally, and it worked out in my favor. It was so great. Um, making sure you're checking with other renters— maybe you rent out a room, or you rent That second property, knowing what's in your property—it's really important. There's no what's the word I'm looking for? There's no he said she said. It's here; it's documented. The other thing is we talked about it last week because unfortunately it was fire prevention week this week. But if you have a fire in your house that isn't caused by a natural disaster, you have a fire in your house caused by a pan that just catches fire due to grease or some other. Spark goes off, you maybe want to take a home inventory. I highly recommend it. And that way, when your claim— when you're ready to file your claim, boom, you have it. There it is. And you just submit it to your insurance agent, and there's no stressing over remembering what you had or figuring out how to create this claim because you're so stressed out because you just had this traumatic experience. So making it easy And getting prepared is really important. I'm looking at my list, so I'm not ignoring you, but I just wanna make sure, it's a lot of things for 33 items. Calculating your net worth. Most people forget that their house is actually one of their assets. So making sure you have a net worth and calculating that asset is really important, but you also have items inside your house, and generally those items are worth a lot of money. Many people don't realize, but many of the items in their house, as you buy things and accumulate it, are worth more than what's in your checking account. It's pretty big. It's pretty big dollar amounts. So knowing what you own is really important and understanding that. Um, another thing, speaking of that, a friend of mine actually brought this up and it happened to me as well. Taking a home inventory can actually curb your impulse spending. It's amazing. It's— you start realizing what you own, especially if you've added some estimates or calculations of what you think it's worth. And it's absolutely stunning what you've spent over 20 or 30 years or even 5 years or 10 years. And you start realizing, hmm, do I really need it anymore? So it's also an option, control impulse spending. And then you can save money for that big vacation or that new car or something else that you wanna save money for. Determining if you're properly insured. This is really important. Most people are not properly insured. In fact, I wanna say 70% of homeowners across the country are not properly insured. Not because they don't try to be or they avoid it, because they just don't know what they own. They don't know that they may need special riders for certain things. So you may need a rider for jewelry, which most people know, but you may need something else for like sterling silver. Maybe you've had it passed down from generation to generation. Maybe there's some antique furniture or antique paintings that you have. Even an artwork that you purchased may need some sort of extra— thanks for checking in— extra, um, what's the word I'm looking for, rider, or extra insurance policy attached to it. There's a lot of little things and nuances that you may not be aware of that need insurance policies in addition to your overall contents coverage and your property coverage. So that's another thing that I like to do. I actually took in my entire Inventory to my insurance agent, printed copy right outside of Almzada, showed her pictures with the details, and I also had appraisals, so I uploaded the appraisal documents to those items, and she was able to get me the proper coverage because I was underinsured. There were specific items that I didn't realize needed coverage, and she helped me with that process. So making sure you're properly insured is important. The other thing is maybe you don't have special things that require additional riders, but you just haven't calculated the contents in your house, and your insurance is just not covering everything. So God forbid anything should happen, you may not get the same coverage that you need. So just spending a few extra dollars a year may actually help you. You'd be surprised at how little it is when you think about it. The other thing that you wanna look at is what I just talked about earlier, making sure you're insuring those high collectibles or high-dollar items. That's slightly different than insuring some other things, because sometimes those things are not covered under standard policies, which is why those riders are really important. So, you can take that home inventory into your insurance agent and have them take a look at it, and they can help you right away. And remember, they usually don't come visit your house unless you live in a high-end situation, and maybe they do, but it's an opportunity. Or invite your insurance agent in. They'll come see it, and then they'll take a look. We talked about combining households and separating households. Estate planning. Taking an inventory is really important for estate planning. And estate planning, it doesn't start at any particular age. You can start as young as you feel like you need to be or as older as you feel like you need to be. Estate planning is really important. Maybe you have a favorite ring that a niece wanted, or maybe you have this great painting that you know would go really great in your sister's house or something, and you want to call that out specifically. You can do that through home inventories. It's really simple. In fact, we have that feature in HomeZada as well. You can actually assign who you want it to go to or what organization. Maybe you want it to go to a charity or something else, and then you can also put the details about how you want it to be distributed. In fact, many of our customers actually use that particular feature, and they use the estate planning to donate. Items to particular organizations. So it's really, really important. It's really valuable. And that way there's also no fighting over items when, um, the next phase of life comes, because I don't want anyone fighting over anything. Just saying, for me. So you can also print that kind of document out of HomeZada as well. So I'm going to tie a lot of this to HomeZada because you can do a lot of this in HomeZada. But you can use any type of tool to get this done. Budget planning, talked about that. Impulse spending, so you honestly understand how to spend money about your house. Managing multiple homes, which we talked about. Remodeling, this is really, really awesome. So most people forget about this. They do a remodel project, brand new kitchen, brand new bathroom, brand new flooring, what have you. But they forget to update their inventory and they forget to tell their insurance company. So sometimes they may not be covered. If you've got a brand new kitchen, which costs you a significant amount of money, making sure your insurance company knows about this is really, really important. So keep that in mind when you're remodeling something, updating your home inventory and providing that to your insurance company to make sure you're properly insured is really, really valuable. I talked about roommates and renters. You know, if you've got roommates, make sure you identify what's yours and what's theirs. Storage units. Most people forget to do this. You may have a shed outside. You may have a storage unit on a third-party place. The reason why we have all these great shows, these Storage War shows— yeah, Storage— I'm trying to remember this— is because people forget what they own in them. So they don't have an estate plan even with their storage information. They don't even know what's in their storage unit, or they can't even remember that they even had a storage unit. So this is really awesome because you can actually track, tackle, tackle all this information in one spot. And once again, you can do this in HomeZada. You just create a space called storage unit and go in and take pictures and document all the details. It's super valuable. Debt consolidation. This is really important too. So understanding that you may need to liquidate some items in your home, knowing what you own first, and maybe you have appraisals or you have values already assigned to them, knowing what that is, you can liquidate that information. This may not only be just debt consolidation or liquidation, this may be you just want to sell things and you want to move on. and knowing what you have is really valuable. Or the next generation after you've moved on to the next phase of life may need to do this for you. So making their lives easier will also help, and that goes back to estate planning as well. A lot of times there are adult children that are now in the process of caring for their adult parents, And so, knowing what is in not only your home, but your adult parents' home, is also very important. That way, you know how it needs to be distributed. If you are the power of attorney or what have you, you can make it really easy and you can walk through with your parents on helping them identify what they want to go to whom, what needs to go to whom. But you can also help them identify what's in their house. Mm-hmm. So if you need to help them with maintenance, knowing the equipment and the appliances and the types of activities they have in their house, products and solutions, you can get the proper cleaning tools and solutions in there, the proper cleaning individuals, the maintenance individuals, maintenance tasks. You get all of that organized just by having a home inventory, so there's a lot more visibility. Robbery. A lot of people forget about robbery. 1 in 5 homes is burglarized in the US, and that's a lot of homes. So making sure you identify with what you own will help you not only potentially issue a claim to your insurance agent, but also help you issue and fill out the theft report with the police. And the more data that you have, the better. So if you have electronics, and I'm a big component, like I love my computers and God forbid anything ever happened to them, you want to track the serial number, the model number, the photograph of the item, those types of details. And I'm a firm believer, if you don't want to enter in type of information like that, take photographs, get really down and dirty into the serial and the model number. So you take a really close-up photograph so that you can see it and you can provide that to the police officers and your insurance agents and what have you. Another reason to take a home inventory is maybe there's been some damage to your house, whether it's a tree fell on it— I had that happen recently with one of my clients— or whether you have a pipe that breaks or a toilet that floods your house, you need to then repair your house. And in fact, one of my clients, she recently told me this story, she put it online as well, she had pictures of her home before and after a tree that was really old split. And half of it fell on our house. And it damaged our roof. So get this one. Here's what happens when you take a home inventory and then you take after photos and report this to your insurance agent. The insurance agent couldn't get an appraiser out to the home for about 3 weeks. But if she would've left the tree on the house, it would've caused more damage. So she called a tree removal company and the tree removal company came and removed everything. The appraiser came out. The tree was no longer on the house. All he saw was a damaged roof and this tree cut up, and he basically said, "Well, we have no proof, so we can pay you for the tree removal." And she said, "Well, wait." She shows them the pictures, the inventory before and the the pictures after, and they said, "Oh, now we're talking. We're gonna pay for you to replace your entire roof." She indicated that to me. That was over a $10,000 bill to fix her roof. And so because she had the proper documentation, she basically saved that kind of money. It's amazing what a home inventory will do and how much it will save you simply by taking the photographs. So I'm gonna leave you with that one too. The other thing you want to take into consideration is documents. So if a house were to burn down or it were to flood or something, paper doesn't like water, nor does it like fire. That's just the reality. So what can you do to make sure you have key documents stored away and accessible after something trying has happened to your house? Taking those documents and storing them in a centralized location is extremely valuable. I add, Um, home— I add documents everywhere, and I've done a document series on what kind of documents you can store all throughout HomeZada, and you can come back and see it. It's on Facebook, so you can look at our videos and see that. But documents, super, super important because you just never know what is going to happen, and you may need to access those documents when you're not in your house someday. So it's really important. Uh, knowing what you own in your house also helps you identify how to care for your house. That's just really important. If you know your equipment, if you know your appliances, if you know the type of flooring that you have, if you know the paint colors, etc., you can take care of your house more effectively. So it's really, really important. So home inventory can help with that. And by the way, good maintenance maintains and creates a valuable home. One of the number one things to keep a home valuable is to keep it maintained. So, keep that in mind. Got a little itch on my ear. Okay, so when you're selling your home, taking a home inventory of all the things that are in your house is also very valuable. When you're selling your home, you need to know what's in your house, especially if you're gonna have open houses. You don't want anyone to come in and take anything or just pick something up, 'cause you just never know. So, keep that in mind. The same thing goes for buying a house. Knowing what you have from your previous house and what will fit into the new house is really important. So you can know what can transition to a moving truck and what cannot, and what you need to sell, and so on and so forth. The other thing that I like to take an inventory for as well is when I'm selling a house, I wanna give all of my fixed assets, which is all of my walls, all of my blinds, maybe my appliances, all those details to my new homebuyer. I don't want that anymore, I don't need it anymore, but I can give that to them and they can have it of record so that they can then continue to manage and maintain the house. Running a business from home. There's a lot of people that work out of their homes nowadays. Whether you're in technology, whether you have a construction company, whether you have a plumbing company, Whatever the case may be, maybe you have a remote pet cleaning company. Knowing that those components are in your house, taking a home inventory or an inventory of your business products is very important. Computers are extremely valuable. Construction equipment is extremely valuable. And in most cases, if you are to lose construction equipment, especially if it's a business, You need to document each and every one of your tools that you have. So it's not looking in a toolbox and taking a picture. You have to literally lay out each and every tool you have and take a photograph of each hammer, of each screwdriver, of each lug bolts, whatever. I mean, you just have to take pictures of everything. And I'm sorry, my construction experience is usually much better than this. And it also goes for little items that affect your business, meaning supplies and washers and stuff like that, to the large equipment. Whether you've got a truck, whether you've got electric machinery and power tools, whatever you've got, it's really, really important. And I bring up the construction thing because those are things that are easily taken and you need to make sure you document it. Especially if you're on shared jobs with other people. Understanding the overall value of your home. Like I said before, keeping a home inventory, the receipts, knowing what the estimates are, how to repair it, that's really important. To get organized. Now, a lot of people think, well, to get organized is such a fluffy little thing, but seriously, the more organized you are, the more time you save, the more money you can save, And the less stress you have on your human. And when you are less stressed, you perform better at life. That's just a reality check. So that's also very valuable. The next thing to do is maybe you want to purge, which also aligns with getting organized. You want to purge what's in your house. You're ready for something new, or you just want to donate, or you want to downsize. Whatever the case may be, you want to purge and you want to remove things. Highly recommend a home inventory helps you do that. You can start identifying what's important and what's not. To understand what you own. So everything about a home inventory is about understanding what you own. But a lot of times it's important to understand what you own because you oftentimes go and buy the same thing over and over again. Let me tell you about a personal experience. So funny. So I couldn't find, I have a, Detailed home inventory, but I couldn't find one thing I was looking for because I'd either moved it or something happened. This item was a hedge trimmer for my, my, um, landscaping outside. And I could not find this to save my life. So it was stored somewhere in my garage, and I have a pretty neat garage. It's very clean, but I still couldn't find it because it was on a top shelf way above my head, and I didn't get out a ladder, and I just couldn't see. It was way back in the top shelf. So I went out and I bought another one. So I bought another one and I said, I know it's here somewhere, I know it is. But I bought another hedge trimmer for my landscaping and same thing happened. I couldn't find it again. 2 years go by. If you recall, we had a drought, so there was no— nothing was getting touched in our yards. I had to buy another one. Lo and behold, I finally found them and I realized I have 3 Count them, 3 hedge trimmers in my garage, and I only need one. So needless to say, I've got 2 hedge trimmers. Anyone needs them, let me know. And, um, I could have saved money had I documented exactly where that item was in my home inventory. Guess what I did? I documented exactly where all 3 of them are in my home inventory inside my garage. So it's important because I hate wasting money. So it's important. We talked about downsizing. If you have to downsize, you need to remove things and you need to make sure that you can get those things in your house inside the next house. If you leave a really big house, maybe you live in like a 4,000 square foot house and you want to downsize to a 2,000 square foot house, the likelihood of all that furniture fitting in the 2,000 square foot house is not very likely. So you may need to remove items and Sell them in order to go from there. And then finally, you are having a growing family. Maybe you've added more family members, maybe you've added more pets, maybe you've brought in your elderly parents to live with you. Knowing where everything is and knowing what you need based on all those different growth strategies— pets, babies, and elderly parents— you need to understand how to actually maintain your home accordingly. And you need to know what you need in your home. So we hope these 33 home inventory reasons are important enough for you to get started on your home inventory. It's really, really important. Don't let a natural disaster be the only reason why you need a home inventory. And if you have any questions for us at Homesatta, please let us know. If you wanna see specific videos, let us know as well in the comments. And we hope you have a wonderful day. And for those of you who were visiting us on our live video, thank you so much. For those of you who have watched this after the fact, once again, thank you, thank you, thank you so much, and have a wonderful, safe