Know exactly where you stand.

Assets minus liabilities, including the ones you avoid looking at

The arithmetic is trivial. The difficulty is being complete and being honest about values. A car is worth what someone would pay for it today, not what you paid. A house is worth roughly what comparable homes nearby have sold for, minus the cost of selling, which is a larger deduction than most people assume.

Retirement accounts count, and they are usually the largest asset for anyone in mid-career. Include the balance you actually see; the tax you will eventually owe on a traditional account is a real future cost that a simple net worth figure does not capture.

Debt-to-asset ratio: how much of what you own is really yours

Total liabilities divided by total assets. Two people with identical net worth can be in very different positions, because $50,000 of net worth on $60,000 of assets is nothing like $50,000 on $600,000 of assets carrying $550,000 of debt. The second is far more fragile if asset values fall.

Below roughly 30% is comfortable, and above about 60% means most of what you appear to own belongs to somebody else. A recent homebuyer will start high and improve for years, which is normal rather than alarming. It is the direction over time that carries the information.

Liquidity is a separate question from wealth

The liquid share of assets asks how much you could actually reach this week. Home equity and retirement accounts are real wealth, but you cannot spend either without selling, borrowing, or paying a penalty. Someone can be comfortably wealthy on paper and unable to cover a $2,000 repair.

That is what emergency runway measures: liquid assets divided by monthly expenses, which is how many months you could cover with no income at all. The usual guidance is three to six months, more if your income is variable or your field hires slowly. It is the ratio most worth fixing first, because it determines whether a bad month becomes high-interest debt.

The trend matters more than the level

A single net worth figure has almost no meaning without context. Its value comes from the direction, which is why this page saves dated snapshots and charts them. One snapshot is a number; a year of them is feedback on every financial decision you made in that year.

Expect it to be lumpy. Markets fall, cars depreciate, and a month with a large planned purchase looks like a setback without being one. The useful comparison is year over year, and the useful question is whether the trend survives the months that go badly.

Where your data goes

Nowhere. Everything you type stays in your browser's local storage on this device, and snapshots are saved the same way. There is no account and no server holding any of it, which is also why clearing your browser data or opening the page on your phone will show you an empty sheet. The site does count anonymous page views using a cookieless analytics service that respects Do Not Track. It records that a page was opened. It never sees anything you typed into it.

If the ratios point at a problem, the budget builder is where the monthly cash to fix it has to come from. The tradeoff is that there is no backup. If the figures matter to you, keep a copy somewhere else. It is a deliberate choice: a net worth statement is about as sensitive as personal data gets, and the safest place for it is a machine you control.

Unfamiliar term? The course glossary defines the fifty this site actually uses, in the sense this site uses them.