After a fire, a theft, or a burst pipe, your insurer asks you to list what you lost and what it was worth. Doing that from memory, under stress, is where good claims go quietly wrong. A short video and a simple folder, made on a calm afternoon, do the remembering for you. Here is exactly how to film it, what to capture room by room, where to keep it, and how the record is actually used when you file.
When you make a claim for a major loss, the insurer does not simply hand over a cheque. You are asked to show what you owned and what it was worth. The Insurance Bureau of Canada, the national industry association, is clear that a home inventory, with photos and receipts, is what makes that possible. The claim still has to fit your policy, your limits, and your deductible, so a good inventory is not a guarantee of payment. What it does is make the claim far easier and faster to document, and it stops you from forgetting whole categories of things you genuinely owned.
A home inventory is a record of what you own, made before anything happens to it. The simplest and most complete version is a slow video walkthrough of your home, narrated out loud, backed by a folder of receipts and photos. You are not proving anything in advance. You are making it possible to prove it later, on the worst day, when your memory is the least reliable thing in the house.
Five minutes of setup makes the difference between a video you can use and one you have to redo.
This is your printable. It is general best practice for building a thorough inventory, not a list required by any insurer. Walk your home with it open, filming as you go, and tick each area once you have covered it. Keep a copy with your folder and redo it once a year.
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The video is the centrepiece. Around it, keep one folder, digital or physical, that holds everything a claim might need.
You do not have to build the spreadsheet from scratch. The Insurance Bureau of Canada publishes free tools you can use: a home inventory spreadsheet and a fillable personal property inventory, both linked from their home inventory page.
The single most important rule: the record cannot live only inside the home it is meant to protect. If the house burns, so does the only copy on the kitchen counter.
Keep at least one copy away from the home. Cloud storage protected with two-factor authentication (a code from your phone on top of your password) is the easiest option, and a second copy with a trusted family member or in a safety deposit box is a solid backup. The Insurance Bureau of Canada has long advised keeping your inventory and photos somewhere safe away from home and updating it once a year or whenever you buy something new.
Here is where the folder earns its keep. When you file, the process generally runs like this.
One detail people get wrong after a storm: do not throw damaged items out right away. The Insurance Bureau of Canada advises keeping damaged property, unless it is a health risk, because the insurer may want to inspect it before settling.
Before a loss ever happens, one line in your policy quietly decides how much you get back. It is the difference between two ways of valuing what you lost.
Actual cash value pays the replacement cost of an item minus depreciation, the value it has lost through age and use. A ten-year-old television is paid out as a ten-year-old television. Replacement cost pays for a similar item new, with no deduction for depreciation. Depreciation is simply that loss in value over time. Which one applies to your contents is written into your policy, and it is worth knowing which you have before you need it.
Even a good policy quietly caps certain categories. The Insurance Bureau of Canada notes that things like cash, jewelry, furs, watercraft, and fine art or antiques are typically subject to a dollar limit, which you can raise with an endorsement or rider added to your policy.
To make this concrete, one insurer, RBC Insurance, lists special limits of $6,000 for jewelry, watches, gems, and furs, $500 for money, and $1,000 each for bicycles and e-bikes. These are one company's numbers, not a standard, and yours will differ. The point is that the limit exists, and for a family holding gold jewelry it can be far below what you actually own.
Two questions settle it: "What is my limit for jewelry?" and "What would it take to schedule ours?" Scheduling means listing high-value items individually so they are covered for their full value rather than lumped under the category cap. It often requires a recent appraisal, which is one more reason to keep those appraisals in your file.
If you rent, the building owner's insurance covers the building, not your belongings and not your liability. Tenant insurance is what covers your contents and your responsibility if something goes wrong. The same inventory habit applies, and arguably matters more, because no one else is keeping a record of what is in your unit.
Most home and tenant policies include additional living expenses coverage. If an insured loss makes your home unlivable, it helps with the extra costs of living elsewhere, things like a hotel and meals above what you would normally spend, up to the limits in your policy. Wordings vary, so this is one more thing worth confirming before you need it.
Enter your name and email and your PDF copy is ready to save, with the room-by-room checklist ready to print and tick off as you film. This guide is free to read here, always. The copy is just nice to have.
Your copy is ready. Tap below to save it as a PDF, then keep it with your home insurance file.