What You Own, What You Owe

The number under the number

Net worth is everything you own minus everything you owe, and on its own it is a poor guide to how your month is going to go. A household can be worth six figures on paper and still put a car repair on a credit card, because most of that six figures is a house they live in and a retirement account they cannot touch for thirty years.

So this tool shows you a second number: liquid net worth — cash and taxable investments, minus everything you owe that is not the mortgage. That is what you could actually settle up with.

Liquid net worth is often negative in households whose headline figure looks healthy, and it is the number that decides whether a bad week becomes a bad year.

What to put in it

Balances, not estimates of what things ought to be worth. Look them up.

• Do: Property and vehicles at what they would sell for

  Today's price, not what you paid, and not what you owe on them.

• Do: Retirement accounts at their balance

  Bear in mind that is a pre-tax number, and it is not what you would keep if you took it out early.

• Do: Debts at the current payoff balance

  Including anything you are not being billed for yet — a deferred student loan is still owed.

• Do: Tag the emergency fund separately from everyday cash

  It counts toward your net worth either way, but the months-of-expenses reading uses only what is actually set aside — counting a checking balance that is already spoken for makes a thin cushion look like a real one.

• Don't: Round in your own favor

  The exercise loses most of its value when you do, and everyone does it by a few thousand without noticing.

What this doesn't do

It does not know your income, and net worth is not a measure of it. It does not model tax on anything you would sell, or the penalty on money pulled out of a retirement account early. It does not value a pension, a business you own, or anything with a value that depends on who is buying.

It is also a snapshot, not a trend. The useful version of this exercise is doing it again in six months and comparing, which is why the print button exists.

Printing it

Print, or save as PDF produces a clean statement — your lines, your totals, and the readings underneath — with the calculator's own controls stripped out. That is the copy to file, or to bring to a session.

Choose Save as PDF as the destination in the print dialog. Nothing is uploaded and nothing is stored — the numbers stay in your browser.

If you would rather not do this alone, filling it in together is where we usually start.