The home inventory almost nobody does (and it decides your claim)

The hurricane prep everybody knows about is water, flashlights and batteries. The one almost nobody does is the one that decides how much you get paid afterward: an inventory of what is in the house.

After an event, the burden of proof is yours. Saying there was a television is not enough — you have to be able to show which one and what it cost. Doing that from memory, with the house torn up, does not work.

The one-afternoon method

1. 01

   Video, room by room

   Walk slowly with the phone recording and narrate out loud what you are looking at. Open closets, drawers and the garage. The audio is worth as much as the picture.

2. 02

   Photos of anything over a few hundred dollars

   Appliances, electronics, tools, jewelry, bikes. Include the label with the brand and serial number where you can.

3. 03

   Receipts and invoices wherever they already are

   Search your email by brand and drop the PDFs into the same folder. You do not need paper copies.

4. 04

   Store it outside the house

   In the cloud, not only on the phone. If the phone gets soaked or lost during an evacuation, the inventory goes with it.

The part that also prevents damage

While you are in prep mode, there are four checks that genuinely lower the odds of a claim:

• Roof: loose or missing shingles, the seals on the pipe boots, and the condition of the gutters.
• Trees: branches hanging over the roof or over the power line.
• Drainage: gutter water discharging away from the foundation, not at the base of the wall.
• Outdoor AC unit: strapped down and clear of anything that could become a projectile.

And if it happens anyway

Document before you clean, tarp it if water is coming in, report the same day, and keep everything damaged until the adjuster has seen it. It is the same order that works for any loss: safety, evidence, mitigation, report.