How to Calculate Your Net Worth (With a Simple Worksheet)

To calculate your net worth, add up the current value of everything you own (cash, checking and savings balances, investment and retirement accounts, your home, your car) and subtract everything you owe (credit card balances, student loans, auto loans, your mortgage). The result — assets minus liabilities — is your net worth. It can be negative, and it changes every day as balances move, so what matters is the number today and the direction it moves over months, not decimal-point precision.

That's the whole formula. The rest of this guide is about doing it well: which numbers to use, where people go wrong, and a worksheet you can fill out in about ten minutes.

What is the net worth formula?

Net worth = total assets − total liabilities. An asset is anything you own that has real, sellable value. A liability is any debt you're obligated to repay. There is no adjustment for income — a person earning $250,000 with maxed-out cards and no savings can have a lower net worth than a teacher with a paid-off car and a steady 403(b). Net worth measures what you've kept, not what you make.

Two ground rules keep the number honest. First, use current values, not what you paid. Your car counts at what it would sell for today, not its sticker price. Second, count balances as of the same day. Mixing last month's brokerage statement with today's credit card balance gives you a number that never actually existed. If you're unsure whether something belongs on the list at all, here's what counts toward net worth and what doesn't.

The worksheet: list your assets

Work through these categories in order. For each one, log into the account (or check a pricing source) and write down today's balance or value.

• Cash and cash-like accounts: checking, savings, money market, CDs, and balances parked in apps like Venmo or Cash App.
• Investment accounts: brokerage accounts, at current market value.
• Retirement accounts: 401(k), 403(b), IRA, Roth IRA. Yes, these count — your 401(k) belongs in your net worth even though you can't spend it today.
• Real estate: your home's estimated market value. Whether to include it is a genuine debate — here's the case for and against counting your home — but the standard calculation includes it.
• Vehicles: current private-sale value from a pricing guide, not what you owe on them (the loan goes on the other side).
• Other significant property: only items you would realistically sell and that have a checkable market price — jewelry, collectibles, equity in a small business. Skip furniture and electronics; their resale value is small and guessing at it just adds noise.

For a first pass, round to the nearest hundred dollars. The goal is a usable number today, not an appraisal.

The worksheet: list your liabilities

Now the debts. Use current payoff balances, not monthly payments.

• Credit card balances — the full current balance on every card, even ones you pay off monthly, because on any given day that balance is money you owe.
• Student loans: the total payoff balance across all servicers.
• Auto loans and personal loans.
• Mortgage balance (and any HELOC or home equity loan).
• Medical debt, tax debt, money owed to family — anything you're genuinely obligated to repay.

People routinely forget the credit cards they autopay and small buy-now-pay-later plans. Pull every account, not just the painful ones.

A worked example with real numbers

Here's an illustrative example for someone in their early thirties. Assets: $3,200 in checking, $14,500 in a high-yield savings account, $8,900 in a brokerage account, $62,000 in a 401(k), a condo worth roughly $310,000, and a car worth about $12,000. Total assets: $410,600.

Liabilities: $2,400 across two credit cards, $18,700 in student loans, $7,300 left on the auto loan, and a $241,000 mortgage balance. Total liabilities: $269,400.

Net worth: $410,600 − $269,400 = $141,200. Notice how much of it is locked up in the condo and the 401(k) — only about $26,600 is money this person could actually reach quickly. That gap is why it's worth also knowing your liquid net worth, which can look very different from the headline number.

What if the number is negative?

For a lot of people — especially anyone within a decade of finishing school — assets minus liabilities comes out below zero, and that's a normal starting point, not a verdict. A new graduate with $4,000 in the bank and $35,000 in student loans has a net worth of −$31,000 on day one of a career that will likely erase it. What matters is trajectory: the same calculation six months later should show the hole getting shallower. If you're there now, negative net worth has a well-worn path out, and calculating the number honestly is the first step on it.

How often should you recalculate?

Monthly is the sweet spot for a manual worksheet. Daily recalculation just shows you market noise; annual gaps let a slow leak (a growing card balance, an underfunded savings goal) run for a year before you notice. Pick a consistent day — the 1st, or the day after payday — so you're comparing like with like. There's a longer discussion of how often checking your net worth actually helps, but the short version is: often enough to catch drift, rarely enough that you're watching trends instead of ticks.

One more thing worth knowing before you start: you can't reconstruct the past. Transactions leave a paper trail, but nobody recorded what your balances were on some arbitrary Tuesday last year, so your history begins the first day you measure. That's a real argument for starting now rather than someday — and for letting software do the repetition. An aggregator like Seven Financial reads the same balances you'd copy into the worksheet and snapshots the total on a schedule, which is the only way a net worth history ever gets built.

Common mistakes that skew the number

• Counting income or future money. Your salary, a bonus you expect, or unvested stock isn't an asset until it lands in an account.
• Using purchase price for cars and homes instead of current market value.
• Ignoring the mortgage while counting the house — or the reverse. The house is an asset and the mortgage is a liability; you need both lines.
• Skipping retirement accounts because they feel untouchable. They're yours; they count.
• Double-counting: if you list your home equity as an asset, don't also list the home's full value and the mortgage. Pick one representation.
• Treating a dip as failure. A market drop lowers your net worth without you doing anything wrong; the worksheet measures position, not virtue.

Once the first worksheet is done, the hard part is over. Repeating it is pure clerical work, which is exactly the kind of work worth automating — tracking net worth across every account is a solved problem once your accounts are connected in one place. None of this is financial advice; it's arithmetic. But it's arithmetic that quietly changes behavior, because a number you actually look at is a number you start trying to move.