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How I Track My Net Worth with a Spreadsheet
Last week I started a series on the basics of a personal finance plan. In the coming days and weeks, I’ll be going into more detail on each of the topics covered in the first two posts.
It’s a common precept in business these days that if you are going to manage something, you need to measure it. I feel the best way to measure how well you are doing with your financial plan is to monitor your net worth. The net worth gives you a bottom line measure of your finances wrapping up all of your saving and spending decisions. Therefore, the first post in this series will be an explanation of how I use a simple spreadsheet to measure my net worth.
I’m trying something new today – instead of describing in prose how I do this, I’m going to show you. I’ve created two videos showing the basic steps for creating my spreadsheet as well as how I update it each month (actually, that’s not entirely true – while creating these videos I actually discovered a new optimization that I haven’t used previously – so this is helping me out too!). If you want to play with the spreadsheet while watching the video – here is an example spreadsheet to download.
By the way, I’ve created the videos using Jing . They are shockwave flash files – please leave a comment if you have any problems viewing them. Oh, and another "by the way," in case you would feel uncomfortable seeing my account balances, the numbers shown in the videos are just random values.
In this first video, I give a brief tour of my spreadsheet and explain how I initially created it.
So, once a month I whip around the internet and capture all the current balances in my spreadsheet. In this next video, I explain the easiest way I have found to do this.
I hope that you were able to view the videos (and that they were helpful). You can download the spreadsheet and use it as a starting point for measuring your own net worth. If you have any other questions (like how to insert or delete rows), please leave a comment or send me an email.
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5 Responses to “How I Track My Net Worth with a Spreadsheet”
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Thanks for sharing your ideas/sheets and cool use of JING. We might have to go back and change our post because explaining with audio is much better. Great work.
I love the addition of video! Nice work.
The video was an experiment – but it turns out it was pretty easy to do and I felt the post really lent itself to video. Jing is not as powerful as some of the other commercial tools…but it is free, so I like it!
thank you very much for this!!! Great .xl file and great video. And a very handy tool for me.
Once again thanks for your talents and making my life a little more organized and easier.
Many thanks, Mike – from New Zealand
@Mike – I’m very glad it was helpful for you! I’ve found that using a spreadsheet is very flexible and this process makes it very easy for me to update my values each month.