Insuring your Vinyl

Hollafame

Has anyone gone through the exercise of cataloging their entire collection for insurance purposes?

If so, what process did you use for determining value? guesstimate?

This seems like a royal pain in the ass, but would provide a great deal of peace of mind...

stratasphere

Glad you posed this question because I need to insure my records too.

Horseleech

I've done appraisals in the past, depending on the collection it can get complicated:

http://www.soulstrut.com/index.php/forums/viewthread/62447/

Hollafame

thanks for the link...some good advice in there.

I just recently moved and got home insurance...so I figure when I'm able to unpack all my records, that would be as good a time as any to do this.

leon

You could check with your insurance if it's ok to film the lot. It may sound silly, but flipping through the crates and actually mentioning what you think it might be worth while camming is a lot quicker than building and filling a relational database.
Afterwards you burn the film to CD and send it to them. You'd have to make a new film with new additions every year or so (depending on your collecting habit).

beatstew72

Now, it's a long damn story that may make an interesting Lifetime movie, but my record collection was stolen last summer. POOF...a few thousand lps and a few thousand 45s and a few hundred 78s and all my gear...gone. i had no insurance, no pictures, no receipts (except that ebay does have a record of all my transactions). my record collection was gone.

what i'm sayin is that if your records are gone, damaged heavily, whatever, and you have no insurance, they're gone! you walk to the record shop and buy your very first record all over again, or not.

(i did manage to get the record collection back ENTIRELY)
:happyday:

froz1

beatstew72 said:

Now, it's a long damn story that may make an interesting Lifetime movie, but my record collection was stolen last summer. POOF...a few thousand lps and a few thousand 45s and a few hundred 78s and all my gear...gone. i had no insurance, no pictures, no receipts (except that ebay does have a record of all my transactions). my record collection was gone.

what i'm sayin is that if your records are gone, damaged heavily, whatever, and you have no insurance, they're gone! you walk to the record shop and buy your very first record all over again, or not.

(i did manage to get the record collection back ENTIRELY)
:happyday:

story plaese! Just the thought of this happening is terrifying.

Hollafame

Luckily (or not) I'm not on collectro balleur status...so I don't have tooo many recs to go through. I'm thinking just an excel spreadsheet (artist/title/label/year/condition) will do the trick and come up with a system of determining fair market value for each.

Generally speaking, insurance is concerned with replacement value, not purchase price (as is typical with collectibles of any kind, you often aquire it for a fraction of its "market value"). I think the safest, most practical way to do it, would be to say, "if I had to go buy this record tomorrow, how much would it cost me"...so I don't think its unreasonable to take into account ebay prices and the like. Unless you paid $40 for a true $40 record, I don't know that purchase price would have much relevance for the ins. co.

If there are some big ticket items in the collection, however, a proper appraisal might be the way to go - even just for those items (your typical insurance adjuster is pretty likely to balk at a claim that some old record is worth $500+).

pcmr

froz1 said:

beatstew72 said:

Now, it's a long damn story that may make an interesting Lifetime movie, but my record collection was stolen last summer. POOF...a few thousand lps and a few thousand 45s and a few hundred 78s and all my gear...gone. i had no insurance, no pictures, no receipts (except that ebay does have a record of all my transactions). my record collection was gone.

what i'm sayin is that if your records are gone, damaged heavily, whatever, and you have no insurance, they're gone! you walk to the record shop and buy your very first record all over again, or not.

(i did manage to get the record collection back ENTIRELY)
:happyday:

story plaese! Just the thought of this happening is terrifying.

the fact that you got it back warants posting the story
don't let us hangin bruh

button

I think about this from time to time. A question I always had was if you're insuring your collection, is that just a lump sum type thing, or is it itemized? Like if I insured my entire collection valued at sayyy.. $30k, and a $500 record gets lost/stolen/broken, would my policy cover that one record? Or does something crazy have to happen to the entire lot... like fire/mass theft/ meteor strike etc...