One of the most devastating risks that we are subjected to in our homes is fire. In seconds, everything that surrounds you can be gone. It’s highly stressful, highly emotional and no one can imagine how it will affect them.

All of a sudden, everything that you took for granted has been destroyed, you realise that you can’t just crawl in to bed or sit down on the couch to gather your thoughts. You will probably not even be allowed to enter your home for quite some time after the fire has been extinguished.

Now you are essentially homeless and trying to adjust to an extremely inconvenient way of life. You may have a family that are depending on you to help them adjust to their completely foreign surroundings. The time comes where you need to make the claim to your insurance company.

Could you list every single item you owned in this position? Everything from your clothes to your furniture, to your silverware and every single moveable item in your home which was not fixed to the structure.

Most people cannot. Because of that one fact alone, you could lose out on the major benefit of having insurance in the first place. The goal of insurance is to protect you from devastating loss. If you are not prepared, you will never be back in the situation, exactly as you were, prior to the loss. Therefore, in simple terms, you are paying your home insurance or renters premium to cover only a percentage of your contents.

Don’t be one of the high percentage of people who underestimate the value of their contents. Remember, no one is asking you how much you could sell your old couch for, they are asking you how much it would cost to replace it with like kind and quality. They can be two entirely different values.

The best thing you can do to be prepared is to look at when your policy is up for renewal and then make your job for the month prior to renewal, to go around your property taking stock of all your belongings. The first time will be the hardest, but after that, it will be simply a case of deleting the old and adding the new.

If you need some help completing the home inventory, please feel free to download this inventory template which should give you some ideas where to begin.

It will take some time, but it is definitely a worthwhile investment. Take the time to do it today, don’t put it off.

Once you have completed it, you could print out a copy and give it to your insurer, but it would definitely be a great idea to email it to yourself. Then, even if the printed copy is destroyed, you will always have an electronic copy to fall back on.