On a related, note, having some sort of home inventory is a must, or your insurance becomes far less valuable. You claim you had 12 pairs of white socks, but can you prove it? I tried a home inventory app and found it beyond tedious and time consuming. A good video of your entire house, opening each closet and cabinet and draw, and moving around the contents as necessary to show everything, take about 10 minutes. Store it in the cloud somehow.
Sometimes the root problem is having 12 pairs of white socks.
Here's another sea story. I'm definitely not a minimalist (especially when it comes to longboards) but this incident started me on the path to "less stuff".
I used to own 3000+ paperbacks, lovingly collected since the 1960s and hauled around with me all the way up to 2000. After one military move (when our daughter was in kindergarten) three boxes of paperbacks were missing. The inventory said something helpful like "Books". By
my anal-retentive habit of shelving my books alphabetically process of elimination I knew it was something like "~100 paperbacks by authors of last names starting with letters D through F." I forget the reason that the military wouldn't take the claim (not enough info? too much weight?) but it ended up getting kicked back to our personal property insurer.
Armed Forces Insurance is pretty good, and we've been with them for over 30 years. However they wanted an inventory list, or sales receipts, or more documentation than we had. The member service reps agreed that they were asking for ridiculous details, but those were the rules. I had a "replacement cost" policy which meant that I could get new paperbacks, but they wanted to make sure that I bought one-for-one replacements even if the titles were decades old or no longer in paperback. The bickering went on for a few weeks and then I finally suggested that I'd have to hire a claims adjuster. They
wanted to make this stop negotiated that I could buy any 100 paperbacks (up to $1000), send them the receipt, and they'd reimburse me.
I realized that if I couldn't even remember the authors of my "precious" paperbacks, let alone the titles, then they probably weren't so precious after all. I was still on active duty and had no free time, either, let alone time to go book shopping. The claims clock was ticking but I wasn't looking forward to having to buy 100 books, collect sales receipts, and send in more paperwork.
Then our daughter came home from kindergarten with a flyer from a Scholastic book fair. We realized that we could buy 100 books from them and donate them to the school.
We talked to her school's librarian, and then we went shopping at the local Scholastic warehouse. The librarian picked out 100 titles from the kid's paperbacks section (which, ironically, fit into three boxes) and I paid for them. I got a two-foot-long cash register receipt that essentially said "100 paperbacks" and sent it in to AFI, who reimbursed me. We also got a very nice letter from the school, and our daughter was a hero.
After that, though, I started culling the rest of my collection. A few years later (faced with another premium increase) we canceled our personal property insurance.
In 2012 I entered the last paperback 250 titles into a spreadsheet with the intent of someday replacing them with Kindle versions, but so far there's been too much new material out there for me to get around to replicating my classics. Today our hardcopy is down to yearbooks and about two dozen reference books. I have another dozen titles that I should probably drop off at the library on my next trip...
UPDATE! I called Allstate, and lowered my personal property protection to $10,000. This dropped the yearly premium from $181 to $135. I also raised the deductible from $500 to $1,000 which is the maximum, and which further lowered the premium to $125.
So, I saved $56 with a four minute telephone call. It's costing me $10/mo for peace of mind. Feelin' pretty good about it.
Next, I need to make that video of the apartment, and store it in Dropbox.
Very nice! Better yet, it's done and you don't have to think about it every time you pay the bill...