A post on Blueprint for Financial Prosperity and my recent post about home & contents insurance for students got me thinking that I should do my own inventory of possessions in case anything happens to them (theft, fire etc.).
Here’s a little idea I came up to help keep track of your valuable items – when you buy anything expensive, take a photo of it along with it’s receipt and upload it to Flickr, the photo-sharing service (you can sign up for a free account, which gives you a limited amount of uploads in a month, but should be sufficient for this purpose – I’ve recently signed up for a Pro account, which is not too expensive either).
Mark these photos as private, as we’re not going to share these, unless you want the whole world to be able to see what nice expensive possessions you have, and add them to a set called “inventory” (or something similar), so that you can find them easily – you can also give them tags, such as “computer” or “camera”, which will also help you to find them if you use Flickr a lot.
The beauty of this is that you have a pictoral inventory and evidence of your possessions in one place, which is also offsite, so they are not lost if anything were to happen to your house. There shouldn’t really be any security issues associated with this, as you are not putting any sensitive data on Flickr’s servers (although if you’re photographing receipts, it might be worth checking whether your card number is shown on there, and blank this out if necessary). It might also be wise to keep a copy of the photos on your computer too though, in case something were to happen to Flickr (unlikely).