Intangible Personal Property

Your most private fan fiction...your investments...your life insurance and copyrights...all of these things are intangible personal property.

Intangible personal property is first and foremost "personal property." It’s yours, and nobody else’s. It’s "intangible" because it’s not a physical thing you own, but has value in other ways. In contrast, all of your physical personal property, like your oh-so-comfy bed, flat screen TV, and pet rock are tangible things.

For instance, contracts (like insurance, patents, and copyright) don’t have value in the paper that the contract is on, but in the potential benefits established therein. If you didn’t have a patent on your precious cornballer (a marvelous invention), then you’d get, uh...burned, losing out on all of those profits. Likewise, investments are intangibles, since they are unrealized value.