Spring Cleaning and Inventory

Now that your taxes are out of the way (or will be by the end of the day), it’s time to start thinking about other things that need to be done. There are plenty of things that you should update but that get pushed down on the priority list. And since you are probably preparing to do spring cleaning anyway, you may as well take care of your inventory and get your assets updated with your insurance company.

I have become heavily reliant on PIMYU to help me for this, and it’s become a tradition to pass over the responsibility for inventorying our stuff to the kids. This year, I am going through our expenses for all of the major expenses to make sure those are added to the list. Our kids are great about most of the items in the house, but things like the new printer have been missed in the past because the kids don’t really use them. It also give me the starting value to report to the insurance company.

Once I’ve finished going through the large purchases, I update the items that did not get added to the inventory. This year we only missed one thing, but it was the refrigerator, so it was a valuable item. While the kids are at school, I’m printing out the inventory by room and preparing a schedule for them to review the items this weekend as we do some spring cleaning.

You can always split up this chore over several weeks so that you don’t feel pressured to manage everything all at once. Do remember to export the information into a form that you can submit to your insurance company. If you do this at least once a year, you will have a fairly current list of assets in the event of an emergency. Having one less thing to worry about can give you a nice sense of accomplishment. We actually go through our inventory twice a year, something that is much easier to do with PIMYU. My kids get a chance to take pictures (they do add some selfies in with the inventory just to keep it interesting) without having to actually clean. It feels a lot less like work to them as it frees me up to work on other things and still get the updated information.

000