How to keep track of what your valuables are actually worth (UK)

This is a gap worth closing, and it takes an evening. Here is what to record, which value to use, and how often to look at it again.

Your valuables have three different values, not one

This is the bit that trips people up, and it is why "what is it worth?" is a badly formed question. Any single item has at least three numbers attached to it, and they are rarely close together.

• What you paid. Historic fact. Useful for working out whether the thing has actually done anything, and nothing else.
• What it would sell for. What someone would hand over today. Usually the lowest of the three, and the honest one for a net worth figure.
• What it would cost to replace. What you would pay to get the equivalent, new, now. Usually the highest. This is the one insurers care about.

A £2,000 watch bought in 2015 might sell for £1,400 today and cost £3,600 to replace new. All three numbers are correct. They just answer different questions, and quoting the wrong one to the wrong person causes problems in both directions.

The short version: use resale value for your own net worth, and replacement cost when you are talking to an insurer. If you only ever record one, record what you paid and the date — every other number can be rebuilt from that later.

What to actually write down

Per item, this is the lot. It takes about two minutes each and you only do it once.

• Make and model, as specifically as you can. "Omega Seamaster 300M 210.30.42" beats "Omega watch" by a mile when someone is trying to price it.
• Serial number where there is one. Watches, bikes, cameras, laptops, instruments. This is the single most useful field and the one almost nobody records.
• What you paid, and when. Both. A price without a date is nearly useless.
• Where it came from: dealer, auction, gift, inherited. Provenance genuinely moves the price on some things.
• The receipt or valuation, photographed. Paper fades and gets thrown out.
• Photographs. Several, including any hallmark, engraving, serial plate or distinguishing mark.

That last one matters more than it looks. A general photo proves you own a bike. A photo of the frame number proves you own that bike, which is the difference between a claim and an argument.

How often to revisit it

Once a year is plenty for most things, and it is genuinely a fifteen-minute job once the list exists. Two things are worth knowing.

Most home contents policies cap what they will pay for any single item unless you have listed it separately. The cap is in your policy schedule and it is often a good deal lower than people assume. If something has drifted above it, or you have bought something new that clears it, that is a conversation with your insurer, not something a spreadsheet can fix.

And for probate, an estate is valued at open market value on the date of death. An executor working from a list with serial numbers and receipts has a straightforward job. One working from a jewellery box and a vague memory does not.

Where people keep this, and why it usually fails

• A spreadsheet. Works, until it goes stale. Nobody opens it again, and the values quietly become fiction.
• The camera roll. The photos exist somewhere among 40,000 others, with no serial numbers and nothing tying them to a value.
• A drawer of receipts. Fine until the fire or the flood, which is precisely the scenario the receipts were for.
• The insurer's own app. Reasonable, but it serves the insurer, it only holds what they need, and it leaves with you when you switch.

The common failure is not laziness. It is that the record and the value live in different places, so neither gets updated and the whole thing rots.

A note on photographing your valuables

A folder of photographs of everything expensive you own, with the addresses attached, is a genuinely sensitive thing. Every photo your phone takes carries metadata, and that usually includes GPS coordinates — so a picture of a watch on a kitchen table is also a record of which kitchen.

Worth checking wherever you keep them: is the location data stripped, and can the company holding them look at them?

How WealthR handles it

Physical assets are a first-class thing in WealthR rather than an afterthought. You record what you paid and what you reckon it is worth now, and it sits in your net worth alongside the pension and the ISA, with a toggle to leave any item out if you would rather see the number without it.

Photos go in the Collector's Vault. Two things about it are worth stating plainly, because they are the reasons it exists:

• Every photo is re-encoded to pixels before it goes anywhere. That discards all metadata: EXIF, GPS, camera serial, timestamps. The location where you took it does not survive the upload.
• It is encrypted on your device, and I cannot read it. Each photo gets its own key, wrapped by a master key that never leaves your device unencrypted. The server holds ciphertext and wrapped keys, nothing else. That is a deliberate constraint: it also means if you lose your passphrase and your recovery key, the photos are gone, and I have no way to get them back for you.

One honest limitation: WealthR does not value anything for you. There is no live market feed for second-hand watches or classic cars, and anyone claiming otherwise is guessing. You enter the current value; WealthR keeps the history, shows the change, and can project a range forward so you can see what a collection does over time under different assumptions. The judgement stays yours.

The bit worth doing this week

Pick the three most valuable things you own that are not a house, a car or an investment. Photograph each one properly, including any serial number, and write down what you paid and when. Twenty minutes.

That is not a complete asset register. It is the 80% that matters, and it is the part you will be glad exists on the day you need it — because the day you need it is never a day you saw coming.

General information, not financial, insurance, tax or legal advice. Insurance limits and probate valuation rules vary. Your policy schedule and, for an estate, a solicitor or probate specialist are the authorities on your own situation.

This is general information, not financial advice. The figures WealthR shows are illustrative and depend on the inputs you provide. For decisions involving significant sums, please consult a qualified FCA-regulated financial adviser.