Track your net worth without linking your bank account

Your bank shows one account. Your card app shows another. Your savings sit somewhere else, the car loan in a fourth place. None of them can tell you the one thing you want to know: am I, overall, moving forward?

That is what net worth answers. This guide shows how to calculate it, how to read it without overreacting, and how to track it month by month without handing your bank login to anyone.

What is net worth?

Net worth is everything you own minus everything you owe.

• Own: bank accounts, cash, savings, investments, gold, and if you choose to count them, things like a home or a car at a careful value.
• Owe: credit card balances, car loans, personal loans, student loans, a mortgage.

It is the one number that shows whether your money is growing, whatever happens in a single month. Income tells you how much flows through. Net worth tells you how much stays.

How to calculate your net worth

List both sides and subtract:

	Amount
Checking and savings accounts	$28,000
Investments	$132,000
Gold and other savings	$12,000
Total owned	$172,000
Car loan	−$12,600
Credit card balance	−$450
Total owed	−$13,050
Net worth	$158,950

Six months later, the car loan is down to $10,800 and savings have grown by $6,000. Net worth is up $7,800: $1,800 from debt paid off, $6,000 from savings.

How credit cards fit in

A credit card works the other way round from a bank account. Spending on it does not take money from you yet; it creates a debt. When you pay the card from your bank account, that is a transfer between the two. Treating the card as debt until it is paid keeps net worth honest.

Savings that hold more than one thing

Many people keep savings in more than one form: some in their own currency, some in another currency, some gold. It helps to think of each pot as a savings book that can hold several things at once and is valued together at today’s rates and prices. A book with $3,300, €500 and 25 g of gold is worth one total, which moves when rates or the gold price move.

Why the trend matters more than the month

A single month says little. A large yearly bill, a holiday or a market dip can push net worth down even while you are doing everything right. Three months says more; a year says a lot.

So look at net worth as a line, not a number. Is the line going up over the past year? By about how much a month? That rate, more than any single month, tells you whether your plan is working. Pair it with a regular monthly money review and the occasional dip stops being alarming.

Why track it without linking your bank

Most finance apps ask for your bank login, or connect through a data aggregator, so they can pull transactions automatically. That is convenient, and it has costs:

• a third party holds access to your accounts and a copy of your financial history,
• connections break and need re-authorising,
• the service usually needs a subscription to keep running,
• when the service shuts down or changes, your history goes with it.

The alternative is to type in what happened. With a plan-first budget, that is a few minutes a month: what each line came to, and the occasional transfer. In exchange, nobody else holds your financial life, and the tool keeps working offline, years from now.

Where your data should live

If there is no server, your numbers live on your device. That means two habits matter:

• Download a backup regularly, and keep it somewhere safe. Clearing your browser data clears what is stored there.
• Move between devices with the backup file, since nothing syncs on its own.

Net worth for a household

In a household, money is partly shared and partly personal. Rent is shared; one partner’s gym is theirs; each salary belongs to its earner. You can mark every line and account as belonging to one person or shared, then look at one person at a time when you need to. The account balances, though, are the household’s: the money sits in the same place.

For the household budget itself, see planning a yearly budget, which covers budgets inside the budget.

How Money Kit helps you track net worth

In Money Kit, account balances are never typed in and kept: each is worked out from its starting balance plus everything that moved through it since. Credit cards count as owed until you pay them by transfer, and a savings book can hold several currencies, gold and shares at once, valued with the rates and prices you enter. Net worth is drawn month by month from those same records, so you never type it in. The kit makes no network request at all; its security policy blocks every outgoing connection, so there is no bank link, account or server. Your data stays in this browser on this device and in the backups you download, and the Show menu narrows each screen to one person or to the shared lines.