I have been tracking my net worth by hand (yes, with pen and paper) since I was a senior in college. That was 8 years ago.
When I started, I was tracking it every two weeks. I was obsessed, I know. Seeing the numbers rise and fall was like being glued to the TV watching the Red Wedding. I realized that wasn't healthy and started experimenting with a schedule that worked for me. I dialed it back to every six months, then once a month, then twice a month, and now back to every six months.
Every six months I'd spend an hour manually entering everything into a spreadsheet (giving me work flashbacks) just to build a couple of visuals. Then I tried a budgeting app (YNAB if you're curious) and kept my net worth updated there. But I found myself checking it every single day. The same trap I'd fallen into years ago, and I was back in it.
The whole point is knowing where I stand financially, having a place I can update on my own schedule, and being confident in the data. Nothing I tried quite worked for me.
So I built my own tool!
Why bother tracking net worth at all
Tracking your net worth is NOT something that should make you feel bad, even if you're in the negative. It is your reality. It is a measure of where you are right now. Not where you'll be next year, in a decade, or in retirement. Comparison is the thief of joy, so please don't do that. The only place you can start is where you are. And why not start now?
At a high level, net worth is just assets minus liabilities. What you own minus what you owe. But it's so much more than that. It's the single number that cuts through all the noise and tells you whether you're actually moving forward or whether you need to make adjustments to wherever you want to be in life.
You hear stories all the time of people who make an insane income and still live paycheck to paycheck. Then you see the stat that teachers are the third most common profession among millionaires in the US, that study may be flawed, but the point stands. Money is a tool to get the life you want, and your net worth is the scoreboard (can the NBA please turn injuries off btw?!?).
What I actually built
I started building this tool when I was in college, diagraming the database, drawing up the frontend, and coding the backend. The one thing I wanted most of all is simplicity, and that is how I designed it (hopefully, design was never my strong suit).
You add your accounts (bank accounts, investments, debts, whatever), log a balance for each one on a regular basis, and the tool does the math and shows your net worth over time as a chart, with several other reports available.
That's mostly it. No bank syncing, no automatic imports, no complex categorization. Just manual entries and a clean view of the trend. Manual entry takes two minutes and means I actually look at the numbers instead of trusting that some API got them right (am I old school?).
Try it
If you've been meaning to start tracking your finances and keep putting it off because setting up a spreadsheet sounds tedious, or you don’t want to pay for some subscription, give the tool a shot. It takes about five minutes to set up and maybe two minutes a month to maintain.