Poster Collecting: Insurance

Video Transcript

"Welcome to Starting a Poster Collection. Today we're going to talk about insuring your items, and what to do once you die. You want to insure your collection, because catastrophes do happen, bad things do happen, and you don't want to have ten thousand dollars, or five thousand dollars in your collection, and then have catastrophe happen and then you have nothing. You can contact a myriad of insurance of places, to insure your collection. You'll have to state values, you'll have to knowledge, you'll have to have records, and you can basically buy a myriad of insurances but you want to investigate your insurance thoroughly, and know exactly what your insurance does. Because some insurances will only insure it for what you bought it for, while other insurances will insure it for what you're perceived value is. You'll have to pay more, but you'll get your perceived value. Lastly, you want to look at what's going to happen to your collection, after you die. And this is very, very important because you will find that even though you may not think that it matters to anyone else, if it's a passion of yours and you've had it for your entire life, you've instilled that passion onto your children, or they may associate a certain item with you, so there's a huge argument over who gets the 1968 Beatles press kit. And so your children will sit and squabble over this. So you basically need to sit down and decide what's going to happen with it. I myself on my favorite collectibles, since I don't think within my family deserves them, want to be buried with them. That may seem a little bit insane, but then I've heard other people being buried with their Maseratis, so I guess it's okay. So, but you need to make a choice as to what you want to do with your collection after you die. You may want to bequeath it to a museum, you may want to give it to an institution. You may, if you're an Ansel Adams addict, and you have this huge Ansel Adams collection, they may have a charity which is for Ansel Adams, or a museum for him, and that you want to donate it there. So there's lots of places and lots of things you can do with your collection, but you need to decide where it's going to go, and what's going to happen to it, because you don't want other people quibbling over what happens to it."