I had a eureka moment today.
Anyone with property insurance of any kind (not just home insurance) should have a record of the insured property for claim purposes. You do have pictures, model, and make information for all of your stuff right? Your aftermarket car stereo? Your TV? Your computer? I thought so.
Instead of burning this data to a CD or DVD for storage at a relative’s house or in a safe deposit box, why not store it online? This is incredibly trivial to do with any of the free online image-hosting services that allow private images (23, Flickr, etc).
It’s much easier to take digital photos of serial/model numbers and receipts than to write them down, type them in, or scan them. It costs nothing. The data is by nature stored away from the affected insurance area.
You will probably want to sign a sheet of paper, snap a picture, and upload it as well. Again, make sure these pictures are private once you upload them.
9 Comments
Good idea but why would you need to “sign a sheet of paper”?
I was thinking for some form of more substantial proof that you are not just viewing some other pooled online set of images or something. That it’s your account and not your friend’s better stuff… something like that.
That kind of proof will be demanded by the insurance company when you file a claim. They will make you sign something saying that the stuff in the pictures was yours, destroyed in the fire, and worth $xxx at the time. What is more important is documenting what the stuff is if it is not obvious from the picture, like a close up of the serial no., but is that for the stereo or the DVD player? Writing what it is on a piece of paper that is included in the picture of the serial no. will do the trick. Don’t forget to document the date that the pictures were taken.
I have also been thinking about this as a Katrina survivor. I thin a program from Plasq “Comic Life” would also be a good way to get multiple pictures of the item in the same image. You could take a picture of the receipt and the item and the serial number and then put them together on your comic page and upload to flickr.
Just use your own email (Gmail). You can access it from anywhere.
I also use online bookmarking service to store private data such as passwords. I really like BlinkList [ http://www.blinklist.com ] for bookmarking, but you can also use others like del.icio.us http://del.icio.us ].
JJ – good point regarding the serial number on the back/bottom of devices where it’s not obvious what the device is. I wonder though, even though I mentioned it in the article, I’m not so sure something like a serial number is necessary for insurance purposes. If one has dated pictures showing make/model (the front of a DVD player for instance), that really should be enough I would think (speculation!)
An easy way to get the date into each picture, if your camera doesn’t have a date-stamp function: Write on masking tape and just lightly stick it to stuff as you walk around.
GB – Aside from “casual” website info, I don’t think I personally would ever consider storing passwords online. And you’re right, GMail works. That falls under the “etc” for online storage :) There are at least 30 places to store this data, I wasn’t going to list them all.
how do you take a picture of the serial number of the expensive digital camera you used to take all the pictures????
Write the serial number on paper and hold it next to the camera while taking a picture in the mirror :)
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[...] Pandaura thought that this was just a brilliant idea; take photos of your things including the object, model, make and serial number and post them to an online photo sharing program like Flickr. Remember to make the photos private and backup your photos on a local CD. You may even want to sign a piece of paper and put that next to the object when you take a picture. For insurance purposes you should have a record of the insured property. Link Link [...]