Net Worth Tracking – 2nd Quarter 2013

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The 2nd quarter of 2013 came to a close yesterday and one of the things we strongly suggest is for you to start tracking your net worth each quarter.  Once you have the tracking spreadsheet setup, it should take you about 10 minutes each quarter to login to each account and write down your current balances, so this is not a laborious process.

We really feel this is essential because it gives you a quick snapshot of where all your assets and liabilities stand at the end of each calendar quarter and it also allows you to compare your progress to the prior quarters to see what went right or wrong over the past three months.

We’ve been tracking this quarterly for seven years now and it’s amazing to see what we’ve been able to accomplish even during a mini-depression and Laura staying home for the past five years with our daughters.  Consistent saving and living below your means really does pay off!

Just like all our advice here, we suggest you take the most common-sense net worth tracking approach for your needs.  We don’t usually bother to track the fair market value of our house or our cars, engagement ring, etc., even though those things of course factor into a net worth calculation.

We just record all our assets by account (checking, savings, taxable investing account, 401k, Roth IRAs, etc.) and our liabilities by account (mortgage, student loans, car loans, etc.) on one row of an excel spreadsheet.  Each quarter gets its own row, so this is a fairly compact and easy to navigate file, even when dealing with a decade’s worth of data.

Then you just add your assets together to get a total and add your liabilities together to get a total and finally subtract your liabilities from your assets to get your net worth figure.

If this is your first quarter tracking then you won’t have anything to compare to, but come the end of Q3 you’ll have a net worth to compare to at Q2 and you can log the increase/decrease to see how you fared over the Q3 period.

Let us know if you need help setting up the spreadsheet and hopefully it was a good quarter for you!

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Comments

    • I totally agree! It’s amazing to see that debt figure decrease each quarter and the assets figure (hopefully) increase. You really don’t think of a handful of years as a ‘long time’ in the grand scheme of things, but 5-7 years of concerted effort has yielded great results for our family, even on one income. Now imagine what 20-30 years will do for you! You just need to keep chipping away, even at something as large as med school debt, and when that debt is gone those many thousands of dollars will be directed towards savings and investments.

      Reply

  2. I think it’s a great idea to track your net worth to see how you’re doing. I check my accounts separately but I think it would be better to have it all in one spreadsheet. Do you use some sort of software or an online program? I tried Mint.com briefly but was a little leery about entering all my info in one place. Plus, it was not able to access a few of my accounts. If I manually had to enter the numbers into a spreadsheet I think I’d be less likely to do it!

    Reply

    • I just use an excel spreadsheet/google docs to track this. Honestly, it’s a really simple spreadsheet and doesn’t contain any bells and whistles. I’ve tried in vain multiple times to attach an example to this post, but it always ends up being too wide. I apologize for that and hopefully by next quarter I’ll figure out a way to get an example on the site!
      Just picture this excel file: only one single row per quarter. To the right you have your columns where you list each account in a separate column. Add all the assets and all all the liabilities. Then just subtract liabilities from assets to get your net worth. Compare to last quarter with a simple formula and you’re done!
      This is manual input though, so if you’re opposed to that, then this might not be your perfect solution. It seriously only takes me 10 minutes each quarter to log all the data and I think that 40 minute investment per year is a valuable one so I can see the trends and historical information.
      Agreed about Mint.com — I signed up there and then quickly closed my account. I just didn’t care for it…

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