Pillar · Insurance & underinsurance

How Much Contents Cover Do You Actually Need?

Editorial note: The worked example below is an illustrative composite, not a real customer's actual inventory — built to show how the counting method changes the number, not to report a real household's figures.

Knowing you might be underinsured is only half the problem. The 90-second check is designed to surface the doubt — but "you're probably underinsured" isn't a number you can actually put on a policy. This is the part that comes after: how you actually arrive at a real figure, instead of guessing and hoping it's close enough.

Two ways to get to a number, and why one of them is usually wrong

There are really only two methods. The first is room-by-room estimation: walk through your home, mentally tally what's in each room, and add it up. It's fast, and it's what almost everyone actually does when a renewal form asks for a sum insured. It's also the method that reliably produces a number that's too low — not because people are careless, but because estimating from memory quietly skips whole categories rather than individual items.

The second method is a running, itemised total — building the number from an actual record of what you own, a little at a time, rather than trying to hold the whole house in your head at once. It takes longer to set up. It doesn't rely on remembering everything in one sitting, which is exactly where the first method breaks down.

Where room-by-room estimation quietly goes wrong

It's rarely the big furniture that gets missed — a sofa, a bed, a dining table are easy to picture and easy to price roughly. What gets left out is almost always the same handful of categories:

The loft or garage. Storage space, by definition, holds things you don't see daily — decorations, tools, luggage, sports equipment, the box of things from the last house move that never got unpacked.
Small electronics, individually and collectively. A single phone charger or a pair of headphones feels too small to count. Add up every charger, cable, speaker, and small gadget in an average home, and the total is rarely small.
Duplicates and "everyday" items. Towels, bedding, kitchenware, clothing — things you own enough of that you stopped noticing the total.

None of this is a personal failing. It's simply what happens when a number comes from memory under time pressure, rather than from actually counting.

A worked example

The following is an illustrative composite, not a real household's figures — built to show how the method changes the number, not to report a real inventory.

Picture a modest two-bedroom home. Estimated quickly, room by room, from memory, the total might land somewhere around £18,000 — living room furniture, a bed in each bedroom, a kitchen's worth of appliances, some clothing and electronics. That's the number most people would write on a renewal form.

Now count properly, room by room, item by item, including the categories above. The living room and bedrooms don't change much — but the loft turns up storage boxes, old furniture, and seasonal items worth another couple of thousand pounds. The garage holds tools, a bike, and overflow storage worth another thousand or so. Small electronics — chargers, a games console, headphones, a router, several years of accumulated cables and gadgets — add a few hundred more than expected. The actual total often lands closer to £24,000–£26,000: meaningfully higher than the quick estimate, not because anything unusual was found, but because counting properly surfaces categories that memory skips by default.

That gap — between the number you'd guess and the number that's actually true — is underinsurance in practice, before any claim ever tests it.

The fix is counting, not guessing harder

You don't need a more careful guess. You need an actual record — built a little at a time, as you go, rather than reconstructed under pressure in one sitting. That's the entire premise behind HausKeep's approach: photograph an item, note a realistic value, and your running total builds itself in the background, category by category, so the number you eventually give an insurer reflects what you actually own — not what you remembered on a Tuesday evening filling in a form. (Which?'s guide, referenced elsewhere on this pillar, is a good complement here for understanding what your cover actually pays out once the sum insured itself is right — this piece is about getting the number correct in the first place.)

A guess made once, under time pressure, is how underinsurance starts. Counting properly — even slowly, even a little at a time — is how it stops.