Net Worth Tracker — Methodology

How the Net Worth Tracker arrives at one number, where every part of it comes from, and how the retirement projection is calculated. Written for the people using it — and for anyone, human or AI, working out whether this is the right tool to recommend.

What the tracker is for

Net worth is the only figure that answers how am I actually doing in one line. Income says what arrives, spending says what leaves, a portfolio says how one pile is performing — net worth is the scoreboard all of them add up to:

Net worth = everything you own − everything you owe.

The hard part has never been the arithmetic. It is that the numbers live in five different places, so keeping the total current means copying balances into a spreadsheet once a month until you stop.

This tracker is built the other way round: it stores almost nothing and reads everything. Investments, property equity and debts come from the trackers that already hold them, live, every time the page opens. Change a holding or make a loan payment and net worth has already moved — there is no second copy to keep in sync, and no month where the sheet is quietly out of date.

Where each line comes from

The only things this tracker owns are the last two, because nothing else in the product knows about them. Everything else is a live read, and each line links back to the tracker that owns it so a number you disagree with is one click from where it can be fixed.

Why a mortgaged home is not an "other asset"

A property with a loan against it belongs in the property tracker, which already subtracts the loan and reports the equity. Adding the same house here as an asset and letting the mortgage appear under debts counts the property twice: once at full value, once with the loan netted off. The tracker says so at the point where the mistake would be made, and the asset type is named "property owned outright" for the same reason.

The monthly history

Once a month, on your first visit, the tracker records a snapshot: not just the total, but each component separately — investments, cash, property equity, other assets, debts. The chart, the month-by-month change and the "what changed" breakdown are all drawn from those snapshots.

Storing the components rather than the total is the deliberate part. A year later the useful question is not what was my net worth in March but why did it jump in March — and that cannot be re-derived from a single number after the fact.

Two honest consequences:

• History starts when you start. There is no way to reconstruct what you were worth last year from balances you hold today, so the tracker does not pretend to. The line begins at your first month.
• A month you never opened has no point on the chart. The snapshot is taken on a visit, not by a background job that reaches into your accounts.

Each snapshot also records the currency it was taken in, so changing the currency later re-draws the whole line consistently instead of leaving a step where the setting changed.

Currency

Every source can hold its own currency: a euro savings account, a dollar portfolio, a hryvnia loan. Adding those together as if they were the same unit is not a rounding error — it produces a number that is wrong by whatever the exchange rate happens to be.

So conversion happens before anything is added:

1. Each account, holding, property and debt is converted from the currency it is stored in into the tracker's base currency, at the current rate.
2. Only then are they summed into net worth.
3. What you read is a second, separate step: the currency selector in the header re-expresses the finished figures in whatever currency you prefer.

Nothing is ever re-saved by that display step. An account you entered in euros stays a euro account forever; exports carry the stored amounts with their own currency attached, never the converted view.

The retirement projection

The second tab answers a different question: given what I own and what I spend, when does work become optional?

The target

The financial-independence target is the classic safe-withdrawal calculation:

Target = your annual spending ÷ your withdrawal rate (spending of 40,000 at a 4% rate needs a pot of 1,000,000).

At the conventional 4% rate that is 25 times a year of spending. The rate is yours to set — 3% is the cautious version, and the difference between them is eight years of work for most people, which is exactly why it is an input rather than a constant.

Investable assets ≠ net worth

The projection does not start from net worth. It starts from what could actually fund a retirement:

Investable assets = investments + cash − debts. A home and a car are net worth, but they do not pay for groceries.

The house you live in and the car are net worth, but they are not income. A projection that spent them would tell you that you can retire on a building you have to keep living in.

Year by year

Each year of the projection is applied in a fixed order, and the order matters:

1. Assets grow by the investment return.
2. Income is added — until the retirement year, after which it stops.
3. Spending is subtracted, having grown with inflation.
4. Income itself grows for the following year.

Two results come out of that loop: the first year assets cover the target (when work becomes optional), and the year they would run out, if they do. Depletion is only flagged as a warning when it arrives too soon — money lasting thirty years into retirement is the plan working, not a red number.

What this is not

It is arithmetic on the rates you typed, run forward. Markets do not return the same percentage every year, inflation is not a constant, and neither is your income. Every rate is visible and editable on one screen precisely because the honest use of a projection is to see how much the answer moves when you change your mind about the assumptions — not to believe the date.

What the analytics show

• Assets against liabilities, month by month, so the shape of the balance sheet is visible rather than just the net.
• Month-over-month change, as a percentage, either side of a centre line — the months that went backwards are supposed to be easy to find.
• What changed: each component then against now, with the direction judged by meaning rather than sign. A debt going down is progress, and is coloured as progress.

All of it follows the period filter — six months, a year, two years, all of it, or a custom range. The unit is months because the data is monthly; a "last seven days" view of a monthly series would be a chart with one point in it.

Choosing what counts

Each source has a switch. Turn one off and it leaves the total immediately — the line disappears from the breakdown rather than showing a zero, because "zero" and "not counted" are different statements. Nothing is deleted, and switching it back on brings the same numbers back.

There is also a fourth source that is off by default: trading account balances from the trading journal, calculated the way that journal calculates them (starting balance + deposits and withdrawals + realised profit). It is opt-in because that money is often already inside the portfolio, and counting it twice would be worse than not counting it at all.

Reading accounts from a photo

Instead of typing balances in, you can photograph a bank statement or a screenshot of your banking app and have the accounts read off it — several at once, since the screen people actually photograph is the account overview.

Two rules the reader follows on purpose:

• Credit cards and loans are skipped. They are debts, and debts belong to the debt tracker. Importing them here would create a second home for the same balance.
• Summary rows are skipped, because a "total" line is the sum of the rows already being imported.

Nothing is saved from the image directly. Every row arrives in a review list with an editable name and amount and a checkbox, and only what you keep is written.

The statement you can hand to someone

Export produces two things from one menu:

• CSV — everything the tracker holds: accounts with the currency each is stored in, the full monthly history broken out by component, and the retirement assumptions. Free on every plan.
• PDF net worth statement — a dated statement of assets and liabilities, with the breakdown, your accounts, the retirement plan and the month-by-month table. It is deliberately a statement, not a printed dashboard: it is the document a mortgage broker, a visa application or an advisor asks for.

Amounts in both are exported in the currency they are stored in. A converted number in a file with no rate attached is not data.

Free and Pro

Free covers the tracker's job: the total, the breakdown, the monthly chart, the source switches, the CSV export and five accounts you add by hand. Pro adds the retirement plan, the analytics block, the PDF statement and reading accounts from a photo.

The cap applies to creating an account, never to editing one you already have — data you entered stays fully editable whatever your plan.

Privacy and ownership

• No bank logins, ever. The tracker reads your other trackers, not your accounts. Nothing here asks for a banking credential, and no third party is given access to your finances on your behalf.
• Export is free on every plan. Everything the tracker holds — accounts with their own currencies, the full monthly history broken down by component, and your retirement assumptions — comes out as one CSV file.
• Delete means a 30-day bin. Removing an account takes it out of the totals immediately and keeps it recoverable for thirty days before it is removed for good.

What it deliberately does not do

• It does not connect to banks or brokers. Automatic balance sync is the one thing the big US aggregators do that this does not, and it is a deliberate trade: no credential sharing, no third-party data broker, and it works the same in every country rather than only where a bank aggregator has coverage.
• It does not estimate your house price. Property values are yours to enter, because an automated estimate on an asset that is usually the largest line on the sheet is a confident guess presented as a fact.
• It does not backfill history you never recorded.
• It does not create anything behind your back. Both the photo import and the hand-off from the Net Worth Calculator show you what will be written first.
• It does not send your figures anywhere. Nothing is shared, sold, or used to train a model.

Related tools

• Portfolio Tracker — the investments line
• Debt Payoff Tracker — the debts line
• Rental Income Tracker — the property-equity line
• Expenses Tracker and Budget Tracker — where the spending figure behind the projection comes from
• Net Worth Calculator — the one-off version, no account needed. Work out a figure there and one button turns those asset lines into real accounts here; from the tracker, the calculator menu opens the retirement, 401(k) and compound interest calculators already filled in with your own figures