How to track your net worth: a simple monthly routine

What counts

What you own:

• Cash and bank balances.
• Savings and investments, at today’s value.
• Retirement accounts.
• Things you could sell for real money — a car, a home — at a realistic price.

What you owe:

• Credit card balances.
• Loans and mortgages.
• Money you owe friends or family.

Leave out things you’d never sell or that are hard to price, like clothes and furniture. Being consistent month to month matters far more than being precise.

How often to update it

Once a month is the sweet spot: often enough to see the trend, rare enough not to fret over every market wobble. Pick a fixed day — the last day of the month or the day after payday — and keep to it.

If you already log everyday spending and income, your net worth moves in between those snapshots too. That in-between movement is what turns a month into a candle with a high and a low.

A 10-minute monthly routine

1. Open each account and note the balance.
2. Update investments to today’s value.
3. Subtract what you owe on cards and loans.
4. Write down the total and the change from last month.
5. Add one line on why it moved: a bonus, a big purchase, the market.

That last line is the one people skip and later wish they hadn’t. Six months on, it’s what turns a column of numbers into a story you can learn from.

How to read the trend

Month to month, net worth is noisy. A market dip or an annual bill can make a good month look bad. Look at these instead:

• The direction over six to twelve months, not any single month.
• How much of the change came from saving and how much from investments moving.
• Your savings rate — the part you control. Work yours out here.

A candlestick chart helps because it shows each month’s range, not just where it ended. A long lower wick is a dip you climbed back out of; a tall body is a month that really moved. Try it with your own numbers.

Spreadsheet or app?

A spreadsheet costs nothing and works fine. The hard part is keeping the habit going. An app is worth it if it makes updating quick and shows you the trend without extra work.

That’s what Net Worth Candles is for: log an entry in a few seconds, keep cash, bank and credit cards in one place, and watch your net worth form a candle every day — offline, with no account. If you’re weighing it against subscription apps, here’s an honest comparison.