If you own a home, you most likely have house insurance.  It’s pretty standard and is a minimum requirement for owning a mortgage.  But what most people overlook is getting home content insurance.  It’s pretty much exactly like renter’s insurance.

Documenting your valuables is one of the most important steps in getting coverage for your belongings.  Home and content insurance claims can get pretty messing if you don’t have the right documentation to backup your claim.  So here are some simple steps to take before you buy a home & contents insurance policy.

First of all, take an inventory of all of the items that you want insurance coverage for.  Make sure you write down the value of each item.  If it is an antique or something that has been passed down, get it appraised or go on craigslist to estimate what similar things are going for.  Get a record of the appraisal or advertisements that show how much it may be worth.

Next, take digital photographs of all your most valuable items.  It can be very difficult to take pictures of every little thing, so just keep it to your really high priced items that you would be amiss in not claiming.

Make sure your label on your picture matches your record on your list so you can easily find it’s value.  Then upload it to an online database.  You may create a private album on your Facebook account or just get some other online photo service.  You can also email the pictures to yourself so it can be housed on Google’s or Yahoo’s server instead of your computer.

You want to make sure the pictures and your list is online somewhere.  This is in case your camera and computer get damaged or stolen when you need to make a claim.  This is one of the advantages to cloud computing.

When a disaster hits, you will realize that home insurance and taking the time and money to document your belongings is one of the best investments you can ever make.