Ordinary household contents fit on one line

Ordinary household goods do not need to go into the estate inventory chair by chair, plate by plate or lamp by lamp. One line is more honest: household contents, an estimate by the family, with the name of who estimated and the date. That line covers the things you expect in a house and that have no market of their own. You do not pretend to be complete with a list of dozens of lines that nobody can support. The source is the family, and the nature is an estimate. That label stays. You do not promote an estimate to a valuation because everyone at the table agreed. Agreement is not an expert's report and not a sale price.

Specify only what actually has value, or what the heirs want to keep apart: art, jewellery, a collection, an instrument, a single piece of furniture with a recognisable origin. Those pieces get a line of their own, with a description and a photo if you have one. The value may stay empty until someone comes with a document. The rest stays on the single household-contents line. Do take a specified piece out of the total estimate, or note that the total estimate does not include the special pieces. Otherwise you count a piece of jewellery twice: once on its own and once on the household-contents line.

Two dates apply here too, even if the support is thinner than with a bank. The estimate on the date of death is what the family found reasonable for the composition of the estate inventory at that moment. Value now can be different if things have been given away, divided or thrown out, or if it later turns out that a piece should have stood on its own. Note that movement: what was taken out of the household contents, on which date, and onto which line of its own or to whom. A message that someone may have a cupboard is not yet a transfer in the list. Put it in the division only once the heirs record it that way too.

Name the source by name. An estimate by the surviving partner on a date is something other than an estimate by a child, and something other than a valuer's report. If such a report comes, it replaces the estimate for the pieces the report covers. The old estimate stays visible as the earlier source. You do not mix part report and part feeling into a new round figure. A special piece left empty is better than an amount that looked like a leaflet. Results you do not have on paper, you do not invent, and you do not set them as the source on the line.

The household-contents line is not a valuation and not tax advice. Ervazo does not fill in a household value and assigns no price. The source of an estimate is the person who made it, with the date. The source of a special piece is the valuer once that person writes, or the photo and the description for as long as an amount is missing. What the Belastingdienst asks about household contents in a return, you do not infer from this one line. An empty value for art or jewellery stays empty until the valuer supplies the figure.