Net Worth Calculator

How to Use the Net Worth Calculator

1. Add your assets - click "+ Add Asset" and enter one line item at a time. For each row, type a label (e.g. "Vanguard taxable brokerage", "2019 Honda Civic", "primary residence") and its current market value. List everything you could sell or withdraw: checking and savings balances, taxable brokerage holdings, 401(k) and IRA balances, HSA, 529 plan, crypto, home equity, rental property, vehicles at current trade-in value, and any sizeable personal property (jewelry, collectibles) you would actually insure.
2. Add your liabilities - click "+ Add Liability" for each debt. Use the current payoff balance, not the original loan amount: remaining mortgage principal, auto loan balance, federal and private student loans, credit card balances (even if you pay in full - the snapshot is taken at end of month), personal loans, home equity lines, and any outstanding medical or family debt.
3. Review the summary - the calculator totals Assets and Liabilities and shows Net Worth = Assets - Liabilities. The debt-to-asset ratio (liabilities / assets) tells you what fraction of your gross holdings is offset by debt. A ratio above 0.5 means more than half of what you own is borrowed.

What the Calculator Does and How the Numbers Come Together

Net worth is a balance-sheet snapshot, not an income statement. It answers one question: if you liquidated everything today and paid off every debt, what would be left? The math is trivial - a single subtraction - but the work lives in defining your line items consistently across quarters. This tool runs as a Preact island on the page: each row is a controlled input, values are parsed with parseFloat, summed across the assets and liabilities arrays, and rendered in a currency-aware format via Intl.NumberFormat. Nothing is persisted to localStorage unless you explicitly choose to export; rows exist only in component state and are lost on page reload.

Because the calculation is deterministic arithmetic, there is no server call, no analytics payload carrying your balances, and no service worker caching your figures. The only network traffic on this page is the initial HTML/JS bundle. If you want to track net worth across quarters without handing balances to a third-party aggregator like Mint, Personal Capital, or Monarch, exporting a screenshot or pasting the totals into your own spreadsheet is the minimum-disclosure option.

When You Would Actually Use This

• Quarterly financial check-ins where you want one number that captures progress across a dozen accounts.
• Preparing for a mortgage or business-loan application, where lenders often ask for a personal financial statement.
• Divorce or estate planning conversations that require an honest asset and liability inventory before you talk to counsel.
• Deciding whether to pay down a low-rate mortgage versus investing the same cash - the net-worth impact looks identical, but the liquidity profile does not.
• FIRE (financial independence / retire early) tracking, where the 25x-expenses rule of thumb compares expected annual spending to total invested net worth.
• Coaching conversations with a partner, where agreeing on one composite number removes arguments about which accounts "count".

Common Pitfalls and Edge Cases

The most common mistake is counting your home at Zillow's Zestimate and your mortgage at the original loan amount. Use matching dates: current estimated sale value minus the 5-6% you would lose to realtor commissions and closing costs, against the current payoff balance from your loan servicer. Another trap is double-counting - listing a 401(k) and then separately listing the employer match that is already inside it. Vested employer shares you have not exercised are tricky; most advisors book them at their exercise-adjusted after-tax value, not the sticker option price. Cars lose 15-25% in the first year and depreciation is not linear, so KBB trade-in value beats purchase price for year-over-year consistency. Finally, crypto and thinly traded private-company shares should be marked down for illiquidity - an "asset" you cannot sell at the quoted price in under a week is closer to a wish than a holding.

A Short Vocabulary: Assets, Liabilities, and Liquid Net Worth

Assets divide into liquid (cash, money market, brokerage), semi-liquid (retirement accounts subject to early-withdrawal penalty, real estate), and illiquid (private equity, collectibles). Liabilities divide into secured (mortgage, auto loan - the lender can take the collateral) and unsecured (credit card, personal loan, most student loans). Net worth uses all of them at book or market value; liquid net worth subtracts illiquid assets to show only what you could spend next month. The distinction matters because two households with the same $500,000 net worth can look very different: one with $450k of that in home equity has almost no cushion for an emergency, while another with $450k in an index fund can cover a year of unemployment without touching retirement accounts.

How This Compares to Mint, Personal Capital, and a Spreadsheet

Aggregators like Mint (being wound down), Rocket Money, Monarch, Empower (Personal Capital), and Copilot Money read your balances directly by screen-scraping or Plaid. They save time but hand every balance to a third party, often in exchange for advisor lead-generation. A Google Sheet or Excel workbook you maintain yourself gives you history, charting, and custom categories, but costs an hour per quarter. This tool sits between the two: no account linking, no login, no history - you type the numbers, read one snapshot, and move on. It is the right fit for someone who already has balances visible in each institution's app and only needs the subtraction done. For historical tracking, export quarterly totals into a local CSV and chart them yourself. This calculator is informational and should not substitute for advice from a CPA, CFP, or attorney on tax, retirement, or estate decisions.