My Online Home Inventory is the brain child of Rich Teer, and was inspired by the Okanagan Mountain Park fire in August 2003. About one third of Kelowna's 100,000 inhabitants were evacuated; although no lives were lost in this tragedy, nearly 300 homes were destroyed and hundreds of millions of dollars worth of damage was done. Hundreds of people lost everything, and many of them had no or insufficient insurance to replace their losses.

Two of the evacuees were Rich's parents, and one of the things they took from their home was a paper notebook containing a list of some of their possessions. Although he thought keeping an inventory was a good idea, Rich thought that keeping it on such a perishable medium wasn't such a good idea. Being a computer geek, it didn't take Rich long to conclude that the safest place to store one's home inventory would be on a web site tailored to that purpose. Thus, in November 2006, My Online Home Inventory was born!