| My two previous articles talked about why and how to create an inventory of your precious personal possessions primarily for insurance purposes. The storm I was talking about referred to natural disasters but there are other storms in life that have nothing to do with mother nature, such as death, divorce, robbery and/or disability. Once you have your inventory together, you can use it for estate planning, division of marital property in a divorce proceeding, to report items stolen in a robbery, also if you were to become disabled and require a guardian, you will have an inventory to protect your personal property.
ESTATE PLANNING. Take your inventory listing and indicate who you would like to receive each item upon your death. Hopefully when you pass your heirs will spend more time focusing on missing you and not fighting over who gets what.
DIVORCE. Dividing the marital property in a divorce adds more distress to an already stressful situation. If your inventory is notated as to who brought what into the marriage and contains the value of each item, the division of property can be done more easily and more equitably.
ROBBERY. If you are the victim of a home burglary and you have not only descriptions but pictures of the things that were stolen, the police will be able to track your items down more quickly and accurately.
DISABILITY. If you become disabled or incapacitated and have to rely on a guardian to take care of you and your estate, the first thing that your guardian's administrator will request is an inventory of your personal assets. If you already have an inventory, your guardian can focus on taking care of you and not going through your things. It will also make it harder for your guardian to not report all your items and say that they were never there.
Now that you have your home inventoried, aren't you glad that you are ready for any storm, natural or manmade!
Susan Day has twenty years of experience
managing technical projects in various
industries, primarily as an independent
consultant. A detail-oriented person, she
understands the importance of planning
and effective process flow. Day is president,
CEO of Inventory It!, Inc. She offers a free
assessment of home or business. Contact
Susan Day at (904) 280-7849 or go to
www.inventoryit.com. |
