(fax) A Tricky Question...

[brian at lists.frickster.net]

Nick,

I absolutely feel your pain.  About 7 years ago, a crazy, cracked-out woman 
stole about 400 cds from my collection.  Half of them showed up in various used 
CD stores, and the other half disappeared for good.  As you can imagine, since 
she carted them out in my kitchen garbage can, they weren't exactly in the best 
of shape.  Many rare and out-of-print CDs were stolen and never recovered.

I have my collection insured for replacement value.  Essentially, I have to 
front the money to replace anything, and submit the receipts to the insurance 
company, along with a scan of the cover, and they reimburse me.  I had a 
two-year window of opportunity to submit receipts against my claim.

However, this means you won't get the money up-front.  This can hurt if you're, 
say, a college student (like I was at the time).

I would recommend talking with your agent and seeing if they'd be willing to do 
the replacement cost thing as I did.  Generally they're happy to do so, because 
they know they're not paying significantly more than the value of the item, and 
you're getting your property replaced.

There are very few places in the world that know the value of collectible music. 
I had people from all around the world submit information to my insurance 
company to back me up -- although it took a lot of persuading to do that.

I hope this helps you and everyone else on the list.  If anyone else knows a 
difinitive answer to the question of value, please let us know.  I'd love to be 
able to take that to the insurance company if I ever needed to again.

Thanks,

-Brian

On Mon, 23 Jan 2006, Corbin, Nick wrote:

>
> hi everyone...
>
> a very bad thing happened to me recently. the water tank in my house sprung a leak and destroyed some of my fax collection (along with a load of other cd's and books). everything was completely soaked and beyond saving.
>
> as you can imagine i was quite upset.
>
> so i'm sorting out the claim at present and have been asked how much they're worth. some are quite simple as they're still available, but some are not of course. does anyone have any ideas as to what i'd put down as a monetary value for the following?
>
> alien community 2
> 62 eulengasse (sob!)
> wechselspannung
> dreamfish
> dreamfish 2
> 4voice
> wechselspannung
> organic cloud (i could've cried...)
>
>
> all of these are the originals and not aw reissues.
>
> the obvious thought that occurs to me is that it's going to be quite hard to 'prove' what these are worth; would an insurance company accept an ebay sales figure as proof...? the insurers aren't questioning the validity of the claim because i asked for every cd to be replaced, but obviously this can't happen for the oop titles.
>
> any help would be much appreciated.
>
> cheers,
>
> nick
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>

-=brian=-