How to track your net worth when your money lives in five places

There is a specific kind of financial fog that has nothing to do with earning too little. You get paid, you save something most months, you have a pension somewhere and maybe some crypto from 2021 — and yet if someone asked you today what you are worth, you would have to say "give me an afternoon".

That afternoon never comes. So the question stays unanswered for years, and every decision that depends on it — can we afford the deposit, should I take the lower-paid job, is the business actually carrying us — gets made on feel instead of on a number.

This guide is the afternoon, compressed. It covers what net worth is, why yours is genuinely harder to calculate than the personal-finance blogs admit, and a four-step method that works when your money is spread across several banks, more than one currency and at least one thing that is difficult to value.

What net worth actually is

Net worth is one subtraction: everything you own minus everything you owe. That is the whole definition. It is not your salary, not your savings rate, and not your bank balance.

Assets are anything that could be turned into money: current accounts, savings, cash, deposits, investments, crypto, property, the money a client owes you, the loan you made to your brother. Liabilities are anything you would have to pay back: mortgage, car finance, credit-card balances, tax owed but not yet paid, the money you owe a contractor.

The subtraction is trivial. Assembling the two lists honestly is the work.

Why yours is hard to calculate

Standard advice assumes one bank, one currency and one household. If that describes you, this takes ten minutes. Most people we talk to are in a messier position, and the mess is usually one of four kinds.

• The money is scattered. A salary account, a card you actually spend on, a savings account at a different bank, a brokerage, an exchange wallet, and physical cash. Six apps, six logins, six moments to forget one.
• More than one currency. Income in one, spending in another, savings in a third. Any total requires a conversion, and conversions are where honesty quietly leaks out.
• Personal and business are tangled. If you are a sole trader or run a small company, some of the money in your accounts is not really yours — it is tax, or it is float.
• Some things resist valuation. Property, an unlisted stake, a deposit you cannot touch for a year, an invoice that may or may not be paid.

The reason most people cannot state their net worth is not arithmetic. It is that nobody has ever written the list down in one place.

The actual problem

Step 1 — list every account, including the embarrassing ones

Open a blank page and write down every place money sits, including the ones with £14 in them and the ones you have been meaning to close. Completeness matters more than precision here: a forgotten account is a permanent error in every future number, whereas a balance that is a few pounds stale corrects itself next month.

For each account, note four things: what it is called, which currency it holds, roughly what is in it, and how quickly you could spend it. That last one is the field most people skip, and it is the one that makes the total useful rather than decorative.

Sort by liquidity, not by bank

A useful split is four buckets:

• High liquidity — spendable today. Current accounts, cash, instant-access savings.
• Medium — days to weeks. Brokerage holdings, most crypto, notice accounts.
• Low — months. Property, fixed-term deposits, private stakes.
• Frozen — money that is nominally yours but committed. Tax reserves, a deposit held by a landlord, funds locked until a maturity date.

Now you have two numbers instead of one: what you are worth, and what you could actually put your hands on this week. In our experience the second number is the one that stops people making bad decisions.

Step 2 — value the awkward things once, then leave them alone

Property, private stakes and anything without a live market price cause more abandoned net-worth spreadsheets than any other single factor, because people try to be exact and then give up.

Use a conservative figure you can defend, write down the date and the basis, and revisit it once a year. A flat valued at what a comparable one sold for last spring is fine. Precision here is false comfort — the number moves in ways you cannot observe anyway.

Money owed to you is an asset, but a discounted one. A client invoice 30 days overdue is not worth its face value. Track it at full value and flag the age, or haircut it — either is defensible, as long as you are consistent.

Step 3 — pick one currency, and store the rate you used

If you hold more than one currency you must choose a reporting currency. Usually that is the one you spend in, not the one you earn in.

Here is the part that goes wrong. If you convert your whole history at today's rate, then every time the rate moves, your past changes. Last January's net worth is different this morning than it was yesterday, which makes the trend line meaningless and quietly destroys your ability to tell whether you are making progress.

Store the rate that applied on the date of each snapshot, and convert historical figures at their historical rate. Today's total uses today's rate; January's total keeps January's. Your history stops moving.

Step 4 — choose a cadence you will actually keep

Monthly is right for most people. Weekly is noise unless you are actively trading; quarterly is too slow to catch a drift before it becomes a problem.

Pick a fixed day — the last day of the month is easiest to remember — and snapshot on that day whether or not the number is flattering. The value of the series comes entirely from its consistency. Six honest monthly points beat two years of sporadic optimistic ones.

How to read the number once you have it

A single net-worth figure tells you almost nothing. The second one tells you a lot. Once you have three or four, look for three things:

• Direction and slope. Is the line rising, and is it rising faster than inflation where you live?
• What is driving it. Growth from saving is repeatable. Growth from an asset revaluation is not — a rising portfolio can hide the fact that you have been spending more than you earn for four months.
• The liquidity mix. If the total is rising but the high-liquidity band is shrinking, you are getting richer and more fragile at the same time.

Spreadsheet or app

A spreadsheet is a genuinely good place to start and we will not pretend otherwise. It stops being good at a fairly predictable point.

The honest test: if you have not updated the spreadsheet in two months, the tool is not the problem you think it is — the friction of manual entry is. That is the specific friction Capital Wizard was built to remove.