I keep from late 90's a database of all stuff I own, bought and sold. Things from electronics (with full serial number and date of purchase, sell) to Pens and pencils.
I have no idea why I still keep doing this, but it's handy for insurance.
My father has an inventory of everything with serials since the 1990s. He never sells anything so it’s all in the basement.
My father-in-law takes the cake and has a 1,000 or more spreadsheets. He has chickens and keeps a spreadsheet on the costs per egg since he purchased the chicks. I think it’s down below 25¢ an egg.
I knew michel Landry. In fact, I was there when his last objects were destroyed. The very last object was an old leather jacket given to him by his father. This was also his most valued object. He secretly wished someone would stop him, take it from his hands and walk away with it.
In 2000, artist John Freyer cataloged then sold all of his possessions on eBay. It was documented in a website and book published by Bloomsbury [0], later optioned by Warner Brothers, and Freyer made all the talk show rounds in 2002-3 [1]
Interesting, if he committed to the concept. Did he first give the truly important items to family members so they didn't qualify as "his" possessions or did he actually destroy all of his identification, his birth certificate?
At least in California your birth certificate is only a certified copy of a document the county has. As long as you have a living parent they can get a valid copy for you to bootstrap your identity recreation project. Once you have the birth certificate you should be able to get a new ID card, then get a replacement ssn card, etc.
I didn't intend it as 'investing' advice. Regardless of recent crashes, all NFTs are valued (by at least one person) infinitely higher than they 'deserve'.
That's incorrect. Most NFTs don't sell. This you see with the naive giving away their NFTs on Twitter after hoping minting NFTs of their art would finally help them to get somewhere. A large chunk of the ones that do sell are being bought by the artist themselves to save face or attempt to spark demand.
That’s a pithy axiom, but it ignores the reality that people are often willing to pay because of misunderstandings, inadequate information, fraud, lies, and cons.
Maybe on the idea of market prices being inherently just, and every transaction being implicitly fair, that your statement implies?
Does a senior manager at a big corporation, when accused of sexual harassment, deserve a $90 million golden parachute? While someone who quits their job to care for their severely disabled child deserves nothing?
Asking what people deserve is a fundamentally stupid question in the context of valuation. Whatever your idea of “fair” is, it has basically no bearing on economic valuation, which is governed by the laws of supply and demand.
Hehe. That said this does make me wonder if I shouldn’t just record a few long 4K 60fps video walking through our apartment opening cupboards and drawers and quickly scanning everything as a low effort catalog
you could save yourself a ton storage space by using the timelapse mode on your phone's camera app. just set it to the shortest interval, which is usually 1 second
I would rather save the time of doing that cataloguing and cost of higher insurance premiums (due to lower deductible) and just start over.
New clothes purchased for a couple thousand max, new computer/phone for a few thousand and restored from backup, and photos can be printed again anytime. I could probably be up and running in a couple days.
Said like someone who's never lost everything or dealt with an insurance company. You don't spend the time to catalog every little item in the pictures until you need to submit a claim, at which point you'll be glad you can add every single tiny item to the list before they pay out the depreciated value of your belongings. If all you list is your furniture and big ticket items, I guarantee you're getting screwed over. Most people have no idea how long (and how much money) it takes to recover from a total loss.
Source: I worked for a restoration company in the US for several years and have submitted hundreds of claims on behalf of homeowners/renters
Between all of my appliances and furniture and clothes and electronics, I do not think they would total to my $25k deductible. I buy and use cheap stuff from IKEA or Costco or Uniqlo or Next or Apple.
What I’m saying is, I would just take the hit and move on and spend a few thousand on buying replacement items.
Obviously this depends on one’s preferred lifestyle. If you have a Design Within Reach home where each piece of furniture is thousands of dollars, then cataloguing is worth it.
Why even bother with insurance with minimal possessions and a deductible that high? Genuinely curious.
If this is intended to cover property damage to the structure then I hope you have that $25k available - you're not going to get a crew in to fix/clean anything without paying that deductible (or estimated cost of repairs/cleanup) up front. My crews wouldn't have set foot in a house without authorization from the adjuster or cash in hand.
The insurance is to satisfy the lender's requirement for lending me money to buy the house.
But if I did not have a redundant house or enough money to pay for a new home, I would also want the insurance to rebuild or repair a house. It is possible to have enough cash to replace your needed belongings, but not enough cash to rebuild the house after a fire.
I am fortunate to have more than $25k available for immediate concerns. But I often find people who have more than sufficient cash such that they have already insured themself to buy additional low deductible insurance. Not that there is anything wrong with that, but in the age of low cost broad market index funds, I say why not cut out the middleman.
I'm a little surprised that a policy with a deductible that high meets their requirements. Out of the many, many claims I've submitted the highest I've ever seen was $5k. Insurance is cheap enough that I question the value you're saving here but hey, you do you.
My entirely unsolicited advice is that you should be aware how quick you're going to need to cough up that deductible to get anything done in case you do need to make a claim. Nobody's gonna let you put that on credit the way they would with a typical deductible. They will want cash in hand.
I would submit the actuaries pricing the insurance know the most about how cheap the insurance is relative to the risk. If it is only a few dollars per year, then the probability of loss must be so small that the insurance company is willing to take on the risk for a few dollars per year. Now, if you do not have $25k cash, then certainly go ahead and buy the insurance because you need it. But if you do, then you have already insured yourself.
I'm confused. Why does cataloging your household items have anything to do with the deductible on your insurance policy?
I'm definitely not concerned with cataloging my t-shirts and underwear, but I do have some high ticket items that I've parked money in that I would like back in the event of a disaster, so I do have a good catalog of anything I think is important.
If you have a high deductible, then insurance is not going to reimburse you for losses anyway, so what is the point of cataloguing it for insurance?
I can live without a TV/speakers/other Knick knacks in case I fall on hard times. I just need enough cash/insurance to be able to buy a phone/laptop/car/clothes/shelter/food.
So you set the deductible to $25k and just roll with the risk of losing a few unnecessary possessions that you might have to repurchase.
Why's this being downvoted, it's totally true. When the object counts of possessions exceed a certain amount you just naturally lose stuff and the objects own your attention and frustrations. Anyone familiar with this crazy documentary? This is worth sharing https://www.uctv.tv/clutter/
He had to be charming and his message appealing for the film to work. The next step—that Tyler and his lifestyle and obsessions also "owned" the narrator and needed to be discarded—may or may not have been lost on some people, but even those who did "get" the movie can still appreciate the Thoreau-esque manic-pixie-dream-bro appeal of Tyler in the early acts of the film.
I’ve had two occasions in the past year where I needed to document everything. In both, I went room to room photographing everything.
The first was was right before we moved from one state to another, about 12 hours away. Luckily we sold a lot of stuff (mainly on FB marketplace), which took literally about a year—you never know how much stuff you’ve accumulated until you move. And 20 plus years is a lot, with raising 2 kids. I took initial of everything, especially before we let people come through house when it was for sale.
Then,6 months after being in the new house, there’s a wildfire within a few miles ( we live in national forest area of Colorado), and we are in the evacuation zone. So I’m frantically going around photographing room to room while the rest of the family grabs the important stuff like phones, tablets and laptops. And other essentials. Didn’t expect that, so now I’m working on cataloging everything.
In the 90's my family went on a (rare) vacation out-of-state. My parents gave me a camcorder and told me to record everything in the house in case of robbery/fire etc. I meticulously went around to every room in our house and not only recorded video but supplied what I surely thought at the time ... was hilarious commentary.
I REALLY wish I had that video today. While mundane at the time I would have loved to have seen my childhood home, and all our possessions now 30 years later.
When I take photos now, I focus on people (not scenery) but this has me suspect there's enrichment to be had by documenting the "things" in your life.
I take a photo of my desk every six months or so and put it in an album. I have desk photos going back over 20 years to when I was in high school and it's always amazing to look at the evolution of my setup and active projects over time.
Similarly, sometimes I record conversations with my family so that I can listen to it years down the road (especially in the case where someone dies - my dad died 2 years ago and I haven't brought myself to listen to most of my recordings yet). Really reminds you of the real-ness of people who may no longer be in your life.
Quite often the easier way to be a minimalist is to get a small apartment. Nothing activates your brain as necessity. Most things I own are extremely practical, like spoons or pants, or I have a emotional attachment to them, like friends presents or items from my childhood. Even with that I still have way more items than this photographer.
One last note, it also helps me to save money. Stuff that I like but I still do not buy because I want my apartment clutter free.
I live in a Manhattan-sized 1br with my wife at the moment and one of her friends gave us _four_ martini glasses. They’re a major pain to store anywhere and what’s worse we don’t drink!
I had a conversation with my wife about them that literally started with her saying “Yes, but it’s the thought that counts” and I had to cause marital strife by pointing out the severe lack of thought involved in giving us something we have to store in our tiny place and will never use.
The purpose of a gift is to be given/received. It is given to convey a sentiment.
What you do after receiving it is entirely up to you. Don't fall into this trap of feeling obligating to keep an object you didn't ask for, nor expect. Love people, not things.
I say this having had an impractically full home for 29 years, and now only just really figuring all this out. Finally have space to use what we do have.
Applying those principles, I once immediately tossed a gift of a large, ugly toy dog, unpleasant even to touch, much less look at. The friend who gave it to me kept asking about it.
It can happen, that's for sure. But Martini glasses, probably not. I'm sure there's a strong chance they were either a gift to them, or cheap. It says a lot that the poster doesn't even drink! I've been in the same position with receiving sets of shot glasses or cocktail glasses, but anybody that knows me more than a few hours knows I don't and can't drink alcohol.
In Japan, re-gifting is the norm. It is becoming more common in the UK too now that people are living in smaller properties.
I find non-consumable gifts to be a stress to receive, and to give at times. I try to always make sure if I give a gift that it's consumable so that it won't linger, mainly out of respect, just like I wouldn't outstay my welcome as a guest anywhere.
The worst is being gifted something handmade by would-be artists who can't see the flaws in their own work and thus why it doesn't sell, and they end up giving it out as gifts. No joke, had a room full of objectively bad paintings, poorly painted glassware, badly knitted blankets et al. A huge relief to get the space back.
Even ignoring facetious examples like "your passport" or "the deed to your house", this is terrible advice.
Just in the last month I used some sandpaper that had sat in a box for several years, pulled a ten year old DVD off a shelf and watched it, re-read a book from my childhood and connected an obscure audio adaptor that had been untouched for at least five years.
Earlier this year I played games on two different games consoles from previous decades and reactivated a Raspberry Pi from a previous project into a new one. I pruned a tree and dug a flower bed with some tools that were recovered from a grandparent's house after sitting untouched for well over a year.
If everything in your house that's more than a year old is worthless, maybe you're just buying things which are worthless from the beginning.
The advise was worded too general, but I think it's a valid starting point for evaluating how important something really is.
One slightly more nuanced method I've used when cleaning out is the question "how likely am I to need this again, and is storing it until then easier than selling it now and buying it again if I ever need it". The answers to this shift, for example it justifies getting rid of more possessions as you get more income, and increasingly only keeping things that you actively use or that would be inconvenient or time-sensitive to get again.
Who knows what else you would have used, or watched otherwise. This is really personal though. I have a hard time parting with things, but I also don't care about them as long as I have them, so I end up being a collector of suboptimal items. This doesn't mean that others are in the same situation.
you could have easily purchased new sandpaper, rented the movie on netflix or bought new games.
The cost is keeping unused stuff around is higher than acquiring it again were you to need it again.
And why do you even have a passport if you don't travel?
The deed of your house? Why would you keep a piece of paper you could so easily lose, especially since it's on the land registry anyway?
The cost of keeping small non-perishable items around is zero. The cost of re-buying them is nonzero. The environmental cost of sending perfectly functional items to landfill and consuming energy to recreate them is definitely nonzero. (And the financial cost of disposal is also nonzero; it's just priced into your taxes.)
You also seem to have forgotten that there was a pandemic. I expect 99% of passport-owners went a full year without using it because there was nowhere to go. Earlier this year there was a couple of weeks where you couldn't expedite a passport request for any amount of money due to the backlog created by people who'd allowed their passports to lapse during the pandemic all trying to renew at once.
Which actually shows another problem with the "just buy it again, bro" plan: In addition to being wasteful, it's risky. There's no guarantee that you can just re-buy things, or do so expediently and for a reasonable price, or that you'll have the liquidity to do so. Shortages, buyouts, mass layoffs, inflation and price spikes are all things we've seen many examples of in the last few years.
A few years ago I had to clean all my crap out of my parents house. I put them in boxes unlabelled and waited a year - I couldn’t even remember what was in them so went straight to the dump and heaved them in.
Second hand markets are also great for these. I recently sold all of my electronics online. I offered them for cheap so that I can get rid of them faster, and even the most worthless piece of junk, an 12+ yrs old, beaten up cheapo laptop with a 32 bit CPU found its new owner for some pocket change.
Not all junk can be sold though, of course. But I think it's worth considering, maybe someone else will find them useful and then they can live on a bit longer.
Selling stuff is an absolute PITA. There used to be people who would sell for you on eBay for a cut. AFAIK, that's all gone. I could never be bothered to sell the huge amount of mostly fairly low dollar stuff I don't want. Friends I know who have moved say even yard sales aren't worth the bother. I have stuff like a big pile of laserdiscs that someone would probably like but just not worth the effort to sell.
Selling is definitely a pain. I usually donate unwanted items to local charity shops. For more specialist or other items they won’t take, I prefer to give them away on freecycle.org (or a local equivalent).
Friends tell me that my ridiculously large vinyl record collection (that I only really listen to a small sub-set of) would be worth a lot on Discogs but I find it hard to motivate myself to actually do it.
In my case, one of the things I have is a big stack of laserdiscs. Someone would probably pay OK money for them. But no way am I going to sell them one by one on eBay and even boxing them all up as a take it or leave it sale is almost certainly more trouble than what I would get for it all.
And out where I live something like freecycle is very thin.
Many things are worth something--maybe even a bit more than something--to the right person but making the connection to that person is often more trouble than it's worth.
Can you elaborate a bit on how even the yard sales weren't worth the bother? I imagine that I'd basically sell everything for the first person who wants it, for whatever price.
Pretty much going by what a friend who was moving across the country told me. I imagine I'd still give it a shot if I were going to otherwise just chuck a bunch of stuff in a dumpster. And I have had some luck leaving basically crap for free at the edge of the road.
I'm on a fairly busy road but in a semi-rural location so I'm not going to get that much traffic.
Long term cycling or backpacking forces this too. I work remotely, and resolving to very minimal lifestyles. I recently gave away all of my micro USB cables to replace with two cables and one 60W full-size USB output. It can now charge all of my devices apart from the laptop, which can charge another item if I'm in a hurry.
Emotional attachment sure can suck though. Like gifts from loved ones, etc. Not for documenting purposes, but I found help photographing the items so I can preserve those memories. It also helps that most printed material fade away (like thermal printed receipts), so a photograph helps a lot too. I store them on Google Photos (using 100 GB package), so they are searchable by location, text, etc.
→ Each piece was photographed as a whole before being closed forever (any object later integrated into the room would not be part of the Katalog otherwise I might continue until my death). I then moved on to another room, and so on.
→ In order to avoid duplicates, Post-its were affixed to drawers or cupboards whose contents had been entirely photographed.
I have excluded:
→ as a tenant, the fixed things in the house that I have not chosen, such as the bathtub, the sink, etc.;
→ food, which is fleeting;
→ objects that do not have their own volume, such as papers, letters, etc.
I photograph together:
→ any object wrapped or attached to another;
→ objects that are more than 50 identical copies in all respects (sequins, straws, etc.);
→ objects forming part of a whole still present in their original container (board games, box of cotton swabs, etc.);
→ if, on the other hand, the object is no longer in its original box, it is considered unique and photographed separately (Lego brick, marble, etc.).
The site has hundreds of megabytes of images embedded into it, the "suffering from scale" thing is to mean that her approach was totally fine for the first few dozen of images but is impractical now. (I'm still not sure what you're asking)
I'm asking if you're being serious or not out of concern for the site author. I don't know how much more clear I can be.
If I host hundreds of megabytes of images and get a lot of unexpected traffic I may or may not be hurting, it depends entirely on my setup. On one hand she's a photographer I'm sure she understands a bit about how big images can be. On the other hand she's a photographer and may not be prepared to handle the traffic or be facing a ridiculous bill. If the later was the case I was going to offer to help in some way like donate $5 or something to help cover her bandwidth costs. None of this matters now so whatever.
I love this. Thanks for sharing Currently doing it with objet.cc
I don't do this as an inventory for insurance or even 'the final count' of my stuff, but to save the stories / anecdotes attached to my most beloved items. An example here: https://objet.cc/kev/travel-chess-board
It makes me reflect on what I truly care about [re: physical things]; which dramatically increases my awareness when I intent to buy something new. Where does that 'desire' come from? Why should I buy this? Why that one instead of that one? etc.
> Solving the following riddle will reveal the awful truth of the universe, assuming you do not go utterly mad in the attempt.
> Say you have an ax - just a cheap one from Home Depot. On one bitter winter day, you use said ax to behead a man. Don’t worry - the man’s already dead. Maybe you should worry, ‘cause you’re the one who shot him. And you’re chopping off his head because even with eight bullet holes in him, you’re pretty sure he’s about to spring back to his feet and eat the look of terror right off your face.
> On the last swing, the handle splinters. You now have a broken ax. So you go to the hardware store, explaining away the dark reddish stains on the handle as barbeque sauce. The repaired ax sits undisturbed in your house until the next spring when one rainy morning, a strange creature appears in your kitchen. So you grab your trusty ax and chop the thing into several pieces. On the last blow, however - Of course, a chipped head means yet another trip to the hardware store.
> As soon as you get home with your newly headed ax, though… You meet the reanimated body of the guy you beheaded last year, only he’s got a new head stitched on with what looks like plastic weed-trimmer line and wears that unique expression of you’re-the-man-who-killed-me-last-winter resentment that one so rarely encounters in everyday life.
> So you brandish your ax. “That’s the ax that beheaded me,” he rasps.
I had 10,000sqft of belongings up until a few months ago. About 100 stainless tables, 50 office chairs, desks, maybe 100+ racks, 20 chillers, 5 rotovaps, maybe 1000 beakers, etc.
At this point I’m just giving away chromatography gear, HPLC chemicals, etc.
Point is I never want to own anything again. Just getting rid of all this stuff has taken almost a year. I don’t even like owning my home anymore.
Manufactured a bit more than just cannabis over the years. Made everything from centrifuged orange juice for screwdrivers(the beverage) to some synthesis work.
There was a 100-person business at one point and this is the remains.
I'm not into the "Throw it all away trend. That whole minimalism trend the wealthy can experiment with.", but when it comes to paying for a mini-storage (I'm just assuming); it's a win, win.
I worked at two mini-storages whilein college on the weekends.
I learned men and women valued different possessions.
In 99% of the cases, the rent/fees did not add up, but we like our stuff. I get it.
Once a month, an angry customer would empty their unit into a dumptster. The owner had signs up about dumping, but I wasen't paid enough to deal with the person who was at their last bit of hope, and decided Saturday was the day to finally dump it all. One out of 50 customers finally realized that junk they were hanging onto was not worth it.
I did talk one guy out of getting rid of his first edition books though. I was watching him throw away case after case of books into the dumptster. I was sweeping near the dumptster. The first book I picked out of the trash, was a signed book by Hemingway. I knew he wasen't crazy, but he was angry with life.
There was a part of me that just wanted him to leave, and my broke ass could make some good money selling the books.
I decided to tell him forcefully that he was being rash. He took his books out of the trash, and put them back in his unit.
I left the job a few weeks later. Always wondered how his life turned out.
(If you ever have to use a mini-storage: 1. Prorate the rent to the 1 day of the month. Mini-storage owners love late fees. Pick a mini-storage with cameras. People steal, even the mini-storage owners. If renting on the top floor, and the owner only used chicken wire to enclose the ceiling of the unit; you are taking a risk. It's easy to get into your unit. Realize the hardest part of storage is moving your crap in. Most people leave their belongings in way to long. The mini-storage owners know this, and that's why you see ploys like 1st month free bs. I've always felt the government should provide all homeless individuals with free lockers. I saw so many people trying to live out of their car whike renting a unit. I only was one guy who succeed year, after year. My Mini-storage rant is over.)
1. It's auxiliary storage for e.g. outdoor gear you use that you can't fit in your apartment
2. It's essentially bridge storage for stuff that will be moved somewhere new (e.g. a second apartment/home) on a fairly fixed timeframe
On the other hand, it just going to be a headache for you or someone else if it's just stuff you don't have room for and don't have any real plans to have room for it. Both my brother and a friend have gone through this recently with relatives where cleaning out storage lockers was a huge PITA.
One of the fun things about Tick Tick Boom is that Jonathon Larson videotaped his apartment in quite a lot of detail for insurance purposes, so the cinematic recreation is incredibly accurate, down to the individual books on the shelves.
I think it's worth reflecting on the amount of possessions one owns and considering whether having fewer would make one's life better. 100 may be too few to have, but aiming for fewer than one has may be an improvement for many people's mental state.
In the 90's there was an artsy site linked from Bud.com (which should take you back...) of a dude that was in the process of scanning everything he owned. This was back when merely hosting high-rez images was sort of an ordeal.
I see a stand for a Macbook but no Macbook itself. The social commentary is on point. Truly art.
(There is an old busted iPhone, but I'm willing to call it old enough that she does, indeed, own it since it's too old for Apple to repair themselves.)
I have no idea why I still keep doing this, but it's handy for insurance.