How to Track Your Net Worth (And Why It Changes Everything)

The fastest way to track your net worth for free is Empower’s Personal Dashboard — it connects all your accounts and calculates the number automatically, updating daily. Net worth is everything you own minus everything you owe, and tracking it monthly is the single clearest signal of whether your financial decisions are actually moving you forward.

Most people focus on their bank balance. The ones who actually build wealth focus on their net worth.

Related: How to Build Wealth: The Fundamentals That Never Change

Net worth is the single number that tells you whether you’re moving forward financially — regardless of your income, your debt, or what’s in your checking account today. Here’s how to calculate it, how to track it, and why doing so changes how you make money decisions.

What Is Net Worth?

Net worth is simple: everything you own, minus everything you owe.

Assets (what you own): checking and savings accounts, investment accounts, retirement accounts (401k, IRA), home equity, car value, any other property or valuables.

Liabilities (what you owe): mortgage balance, car loans, student loans, credit card balances, personal loans, any other debt.

Net Worth = Total Assets − Total Liabilities

If you own $150,000 in assets and owe $90,000 in debt, your net worth is $60,000. If you owe more than you own, your net worth is negative — which is common and fixable. A recent graduate with $40,000 in student loans and a $5,000 checking balance has a net worth of −$35,000, and there’s nothing shameful about it. It’s simply a starting line.

Why Net Worth Matters More Than Income

A person earning $200,000/year with $300,000 in debt and no savings is less financially secure than someone earning $60,000/year with no debt and $100,000 invested. Income is a tool. Net worth is the scoreboard.

Tracking net worth monthly does something important: it shifts your focus from how much you earned to how much you kept and grew. You stop celebrating a big paycheck and start asking whether it actually moved the needle.

This reframe changes behavior. When your scoreboard is income, a raise feels like a win no matter what you do with it. When your scoreboard is net worth, that same raise only counts if it lands in an asset column — a paid-down loan, a funded retirement account, a bigger cash cushion. High earners with a negative or stagnant net worth are surprisingly common, and net worth tracking is what exposes the gap between looking wealthy and being wealthy.

How to Calculate Your Net Worth (Step by Step)

Step 1: List Everything You Own

Go through every account and asset:

• Checking accounts (current balance)
• Savings accounts (current balance)
• Investment accounts — brokerage, Roth IRA, traditional IRA (current market value)
• Retirement accounts — 401(k), 403(b), pension (current vested value)
• Home value (use Zillow or Redfin estimates for a rough figure)
• Car value (use Kelley Blue Book)
• Any other significant assets (business equity, rental property, etc.)

Step 2: List Everything You Owe

• Mortgage remaining balance
• Car loan balance
• Student loan balances
• Credit card balances (not limit — what you actually owe)
• Personal loan balances
• Any other outstanding debt

Step 3: Subtract

Total assets minus total liabilities = your net worth. Write it down with today’s date. This is your starting point.

A note on the gray areas: don’t agonize over precision. Use rough but honest figures. For a home, an online estimate is fine — you’re tracking a trend, not preparing a mortgage application. For retirement accounts, use the value shown today and accept that it will move with the market. The goal is consistency month to month, not decimal-point accuracy.

How to Track Net Worth Over Time

Calculating it once is useful. Tracking it monthly is where the real value comes from — you start to see the trajectory, not just the snapshot.

Option 1: Use Empower (Free — Best for Most People)

Empower’s free Personal Dashboard connects all your accounts — bank accounts, investment accounts, loans, mortgages — and calculates your net worth automatically. It updates daily and shows a historical chart of your progress over time. No spreadsheet required.

This is the easiest and most accurate way to track net worth for most people. It takes about 20 minutes to set up and runs on autopilot after that. Sign up for Empower free here.

Option 2: Spreadsheet (Best for Control)

If you prefer to see and control every number, a simple Google Sheet works well. Create two columns — assets and liabilities — update it monthly, and add a running total chart. It’s manual but gives you complete visibility into every number you’re tracking. The trade-off is discipline: a spreadsheet only works if you actually sit down and update it, which is exactly where most people quietly abandon the habit.

Option 3: Monarch Money (Best If You Also Budget)

If you’re already using Monarch Money for budgeting, its net worth tracking is built in. Connect your investment and loan accounts and it tracks everything alongside your monthly budget in one place. Try Monarch Money free for 7 days.

Which Tracking Method Is Right for You?

Verify current pricing and trial terms with each provider before signing up, as those can change.

What’s a Good Net Worth?

This question matters less than people think. A “good” net worth depends entirely on your age, income, cost of living, and goals. What matters far more is the direction and velocity of your net worth — is it growing month over month?

That said, a widely-cited rule of thumb from The Millionaire Next Door: your target net worth = your age × your gross annual income ÷ 10. A 35-year-old earning $80,000/year has a “target” net worth of $280,000. This is a rough benchmark, not a strict rule — but it gives you a directional sense of where you stand.

Treat that formula with caution at the extremes. It tends to set an unrealistically high bar for young people just starting out (a 24-year-old earning $80,000 would “need” $192,000, which almost no one has that early) and it doesn’t account for high-cost-of-living areas or people who started earning late. Use it as a rough compass heading, not a grade.

How to Grow Your Net Worth

There are only four ways to increase your net worth:

1. Earn more — increase income
2. Spend less — reduce expenses and increase savings rate
3. Pay down debt — reduce liabilities directly
4. Invest — grow assets through compounding returns

Most people only work one lever at a time. The fastest net worth growth happens when you’re pulling two or three simultaneously — earning more while cutting expenses and investing the difference, for example.

Notice that each lever hits a different side of the equation. Earning more and investing grow your assets; spending less frees up cash to redirect; paying down debt shrinks liabilities directly. That’s why paying off a $3,000 credit card balance improves your net worth by exactly the same $3,000 as adding $3,000 to savings — the math treats debt reduction and asset growth identically. The difference is that eliminating high-interest debt also stops the compounding working against you, which is why it usually deserves priority.

How Often Should You Check Your Net Worth?

Monthly is the sweet spot. Checking on the same day each month — say, the first — gives you clean, comparable snapshots and enough distance to see a real trend. Automated tools like Empower update daily in the background, but that doesn’t mean you should look daily.

Watching the number in real time mostly means watching normal market noise in your investment accounts, which invites two bad reactions: panic-selling on a down week, or a false sense of progress on an up week that has nothing to do with your behavior. Zoom out. A 12-month line that trends up is the win — not any single day’s reading.

Common Mistakes When Tracking Net Worth

• Not including all debt: It’s tempting to leave out student loans or credit cards. Include everything — an accurate (even uncomfortable) number is more useful than an inflated one.
• Overvaluing physical assets: Cars depreciate. Include your car at its current market value (KBB), not what you paid for it.
• Checking too frequently: Monthly is ideal. Checking weekly causes unnecessary stress around normal market fluctuations in your investment accounts.
• Comparing to others: Net worth comparisons are almost always apples-to-oranges. Track your own trajectory against your own past.
• Changing how you value things month to month: If you use a Zillow estimate for your home one month and a formal appraisal the next, your trend line becomes meaningless. Pick a valuation source for each asset and stick with it.

The Bottom Line

Tracking your net worth monthly is one of the highest-leverage financial habits you can build. It takes 10 minutes to set up with a free tool like Empower, and it gives you a clear, honest picture of whether your financial decisions are actually moving you forward.

Start today. Your first number is just a starting line — what matters is which direction it moves from here.

Track Your Net Worth Free with Empower →

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