insurance Archives - A Wanderful Life

If I seem a bit off my game for the next week, it’s because I am dealing with a very stressful situation right now. We’ve been burgled.

Sometime between Saturday night and early Sunday morning, someone broke into our garage and stole 2 of the 4 bikes in there — the most expensive ones — the customised Specialized road bike and mountain bike that Mark is out and about on several days each week. Not only that, they got all of the peripheral gear like the heart rate monitors, the bike repair kit, the brand new high-vis lights, the brand new pannier frame that only was installed this past week, and in Mark’s cycling bag was a digital camera which was also stolen. To add insult to injury, they left their ratty old bikes outside our garage as they rode away on Mark’s lovely bikes.

Mark and one of his STOLEN Specialized bikes

We are feeling quite gutted. The police came out from the St. Kilda Police Station to take fingerprints and they were lovely to deal with both in person and on the phone. But the likelihood of ever seeing these items again is quite slim.

Now I have to troll backward through YEARS of online receipts and paper receipts and pictures to find enough evidence to PROVE to the insurance company that we actually owned all of this. So my entire week may be getting eaten up with this ridiculous nonsense. It’s hard to feel happy about returning to Australia when we have to go through things like this and it came out of both of our mouths yesterday. We forgot to lock our car doors in Moyon or St. Martin de Brehal or St. Girons quite a few times when we were living in France for several years. Nothing ever got touched. But we return to Australia and within weeks back here we are burgled???

More soon-ish…

Just when I thought I had completed the last of the paperwork, just when I thought I had no more PDF documents or blank forms to fill out, along comes the insurance forms this morning. I have had to print out our 16 page inventory and I have to place a value on EVERY single thing that I want to insure! And we have somewhere between 750-850 books in those cartons, and I have to give a specific count.

Creating an insurance inventory and assigning a value for EVERY item we own!

Not only that, I have to list how MANY pair of trousers Mark has, how many dresses and shoes and cardigans I have, how many dishes and pots and pans — well, you get the drift. And if I fail to list them, then they aren’t insured!

In another period of my life when I was in my 20s, I was a military wife and I learned how to pack according to military standards. That meant that every box had to be numbered and every single item in every box had to be listed on the master inventory forms. In this post 9-11 world, that has proven to be handy as we moved around the world a few times and our goods sailed through Customs quite easily because I had such a detailed list. The customs agents in Australia had a friendly laugh at just how many books there were in our household goods.

But I have to say that this is the most detailed inventory I have ever had to fill out for an insurance policy. And I have to determine what is the value for each item if I had to purchase them again on this side of the world.

If you don’t hear from me for several days, you’ll know why!

A Wanderful Life

The Neverending Journey

Tag Archives: insurance

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