How to track your net worth (and actually keep it current)

Net worth is one subtraction: everything you own minus everything you owe. Tracking it is easy to start and surprisingly hard to sustain — not because the math is difficult, but because keeping the numbers fresh is a chore most methods quietly hand back to you. Here's a way to do it that survives past week three.

Step 1 — List what you own

Pull together every asset, not just the ones an app can see. In practice this is where most net worth figures go wrong: they count the brokerage account and forget the house.

• Liquid: checking, savings, cash.
• Investments: every brokerage account, retirement accounts, HSAs, old 401(k)s.
• Real estate: your home and any other property, at a realistic market value.
• Vehicles & valuables: cars, and any art, jewelry, or collectibles worth tracking.
• Other: business equity, private investments, crypto.

Step 2 — List what you owe

Then total your liabilities: mortgage balance, auto and student loans, credit-card debt, any personal or business loans. Use current payoff balances, not original amounts.

Step 3 — Subtract, then watch the trend

Assets minus liabilities is your net worth. The single number matters less than its direction: a figure that climbs steadily over quarters and years is the whole point. Update monthly — more often than that mostly adds noise and anxiety, not insight.

The goal isn't a perfect snapshot today. It's an honest line you can still read in five years.

The maintenance trap (and how to beat it)

Here's why most attempts die. A spreadsheet is accurate exactly once — the day you build it. By the next month, balances have moved, and updating them means logging into a dozen institutions and copying figures by hand. Account-linking apps promise to fix this by scraping your logins, but they break when a bank changes its site, can't see your house at all, and ask you to concentrate every credential you own in one place.

The durable approach keeps maintenance to a reflex you already have: forwarding an email. When a statement or confirmation lands in your inbox, you forward it; the figure updates; you move on. That's the model behind Clarity — a net worth and investment tracker that reads the documents you already receive, rolls real estate and other hard assets into the same ledger, and never asks for a login. It works the same whether you track one brokerage account or a dozen, and every number is one you approved before it counted.

A note on accuracy

For illiquid assets — a home, a private stake — use a reasonable, consistent basis and update it occasionally rather than chasing precision you can't get. Consistency over time beats false exactness on any given day.

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This is general information, not personalized financial advice.