The gap between feeling prepared and being prepared
A national Triple-I/Munich Re survey found that 25 percent of homeowners don't believe their home will ever be affected by a weather event — but among homeowners who've already been hit by one in the last five years, 92 percent expect it to happen again within the next decade. Experience is what closes that gap. The same survey found only 40 percent of homeowners have taken any steps to make their home more resilient, and just 52 percent have an evacuation plan.
Documenting what you own is one of the few preparedness steps that helps no matter which disaster actually happens. An evacuation plan is specific to the event; a home inventory is useful whether the cause is fire, flooding, wind, or anything else.
Why a home inventory holds up across every disaster type
- It's how claims actually get paid. Insurers need to know what was lost before they can pay out — see our page on home inventory for insurance claims.
- Memory doesn't survive a disaster well. Trying to reconstruct a room from memory right after losing it is one of the hardest parts of recovery — a record made in advance removes that entirely.
- It has to live somewhere the disaster can't reach. A phone or a filing cabinet is exactly as vulnerable to fire or flood as the house itself. Cloud storage is what actually survives.
What we've written about specific disasters
We cover specific events and regional guidance on our blog as they come up. A few places to start:
- The home prep that actually matters — the one step worth doing before any disaster, whichever one eventually happens.
- Tropical Storm Bertha and flooding — what to do before the water rises.
- What Colorado's Division of Insurance wants wildfire survivors to know — official guidance on the claims process.
How Homvi fits into this
Homvi documents a home in minutes, not a weekend: photograph a room and the AI identifies what's in it and estimates a replacement value automatically. It's stored securely in the cloud, so it's there whether the disaster is a wildfire, a flood, or anything else — and it's ready to export as a formatted PDF the moment you actually need it for a claim.