Protecting What You Own
Most homes are either uninsured or underinsured, and almost nobody finds out which camp they're in until they need to. This pillar is about closing that gap before it matters — building an honest, current record of what you own, so your policy's sum insured actually reflects it, and so a claim is never the first time you're asked to reconstruct your home from memory.
Contents insurance explained
This isn't a book, and it isn't trying to be — it's the UK's most independent, most thorough breakdown of what contents insurance actually covers, tested against real policies rather than written from the outside. Which? analyses dozens of contents policies each year, scoring them on the details that actually matter when something goes wrong: whether accidental damage is included, how a claim gets settled, what happens if an item's ten years old and has a few scuffs on it.
The one distinction worth understanding before anything else: new-for-old versus indemnity cover. New-for-old means your insurer replaces a damaged item with an equivalent new one. Indemnity cover accounts for wear and tear, so an eight-hundred-pound sofa that's ten years old and showing its age might only get you a fraction of that back. It's the difference between a policy that actually protects what you own and one that quietly doesn't — and it's exactly the kind of detail an inventory with real purchase dates and conditions can help you notice before you need it, not after.
Not a narrative read — a reference to actually use when you're choosing a policy or checking whether your current one still makes sense.