At our first meeting with an insurance agent 20 years ago, she gave us a booklet for new homeowners that included a form to help us do a very basic household inventory. Being a lover of making lists and filling in forms, I started right away to go around the house and write things down, and had planned to do a more, but never did. I remember later downloading an app that prompted me to take photos and record serial numbers, cost, age, and many other details. I probably used it for 15 minutes, got overwhelmed with just how much stuff we had, and never finished it.

Today, looking over my ongoing list of household projects, Household Inventory is still lounging there, taunting me, reminding me that, despite years of paring down and purging, I still have too much stuff.

Then suddenly I realised that if, heaven forbid, our house and its contents were to disappear, I would be content to not reacquire everything we have now. The family mementos (I nearly wrote heirlooms, but our family was too poor to pass on anything of much monetary value) would be the only things I would possibly miss, and they couldn’t be replaced no matter how much insurance money we received anyway.

Household Inventory is now “take some photos of the stuff you have in case it disappears and you might miss it later, (but you probably wouldn’t).” That should take about five minutes and not 20+ years it took me not to do an inventory.