You pay your home insurance premium every month. You feel covered. Then something happens, and you discover that "covered" has a much narrower definition than you thought.
Insurance adjusters do not take your word for what you owned. For anything above a few hundred euros, they want proof of ownership and proof of value. A receipt. A bank statement showing the purchase. An appraisal. A photo with a date stamp.
Most people keep receipts for about three days. Then the bag goes in a drawer. Then the drawer gets cleaned out. By the time you need the receipt for a camera you bought four years ago, it is gone.
A study by the Insurance Research Council found that unrepresented claimants settle for significantly less than represented ones, largely because they struggle to document what they lost. The gap is not just about legal knowledge. It is about documentation.
The things most at risk in a burglary or fire are also the things that are hardest to document after the fact: electronics, jewelry, sporting equipment, musical instruments. These items tend to be bought without much ceremony. You buy a laptop, you open it, you start using it. The receipt is in an email somewhere, maybe.
The shift that is starting to happen is that ownership documentation is moving from paper to digital. An Item Passport with a photo of the receipt, the serial number, the purchase price, and the purchase date is something you can produce instantly in a claims process. It is timestamped. It is structured. It is hard to dispute.
The ten minutes you spend registering your valuables before you need to claim is worth far more than any amount of time you spend arguing with an adjuster afterward.