How to track net worth without linking a bank

What net worth is

Everything you own minus everything you owe. One subtraction. The difficulty is never the arithmetic, it is deciding what goes in.

What to include

Assets: cash and savings, investments, pensions (yes, even locked ones — you own them), property at a realistic current value, and anything else you would genuinely sell.

Liabilities: mortgage, student loans, car finance, credit card balances, anything owed to family.

Leave out: this month's salary, possessions at purchase price rather than resale value, and anything you would not actually sell. The car is the usual argument. If you would not sell it and could not manage without it, counting it inflates the total without changing anything true.

The number under the number

Two people with an identical net worth of 268,000 can be in entirely different positions. One has 140,000 invested and a small mortgage. The other has 20,000 invested and most of their wealth in a house they need to live in. The first is a few years from coasting; the second is not close.

So track two figures, not one: total net worth, and the part of it that could actually fund a year of not working. The second is the one that predicts freedom, and a balance sheet hides it. Our net worth calculator shows both.

Quarterly, not daily

Net worth moves with markets. Checking often enough to watch that movement teaches you nothing except anxiety, and it actively encourages the worst behaviour available — reacting. Once a quarter is frequent enough to see a trend and rare enough that the trend is what you see.

Pick a date, put it in the calendar, and record the figure somewhere you keep. The series matters more than any single reading.

Why manual is not merely acceptable

Automatic aggregation is genuinely more convenient, and for someone with fifteen accounts it may be the only workable option. But the trade is real: a third party holds a live connection to your accounts, those connections break regularly and silently, and a number that is always current but sometimes wrong is worse than one you updated yourself last month.

Fifteen minutes a quarter also has a side effect nobody expects: you look at every account, which is how people find the pension from two jobs ago and the savings account paying nothing.