Home Inventory feature
How many of you realize that you can not only keep track of your finances with Money, but also catalog all of your belongings with replacement value details and links to digital images using the Home Inventory feature. Type money://processstart/HomeInventory into Money’s GoTo address bar and you’ll be taken to the Home Inventory Worksheet that you may have never seen before. Since you are probably keeping a backup copy of your Money data on a flash drive that you keep offsite (you do don’t you? 
), you might as well have all of the information you might need to file an insurance claim on that same flash drive as well, should you ever experience a catastrophe involving your home. It would also be a good idea to include a copy of Money’s Sunset edition Installation program on that flash drive as well, so that you can install Money on an offsite PC to be able to access and utilize your data.
Another way to easily access your Home Inventory Worksheet:
- At the top of the page, click Home.
- At the top of the My Money page on the right side, click Customize content or layout.
- Under Add content, select Home Inventory, and then click Add.
- Click Done.
Now, from the Home Inventory links on the Home Page, you’ll also see another link to another feature you may have not known about - Important Records Organizer where you can keep track of your Assets, Emergency Information, Will, Living Wills, Trusts, Funeral Arrangements, Passports, Powers of Attorney, Tax Records, Birth Certificates, etc.
Ken said
This is great info! Thanks for the heads up.
I keep backups of my important stuff on Windows Live Skydrive. It’s 25gb of cloud storage for free. You can upload files up to 50mb in size. My Money file is larger than that but the backups easily fit.
Hung Le said
Ken,
Suggestion: encrypt the content before let them live on the “cloud”. I don’t know how Windows Live Skydrive works (whether it can provide encryption (if yes, make sure that only you know the key) or has hook to encrypt/decrypt from/to home to cloud) so I don’t have any specific steps. That way if somehow got lost to wrong hand, at least there is a guard.
Personally, I do my backup to a TrueCrypt flash drives and rotate them weekly (one stays home, one to my bank safe box).
http://www.truecrypt.org/
I use GoodSync to help me sync the content between copy from hard-drive and the flash drive.
http://www.goodsync.com/