Time for My Monthly Net Worth Check-In
05 Oct, 2025
Wednesday marked the beginning of a new month. The first day of any new month is the day that, from a personal finance perspective, energises me the most because it is when I update our net worth and get a snapshot in time of how Jonny and I are financially progressing. Are we growing more prosperous or poorer?
This is the equivalent of emptying my piggy bank and counting all my coins when I was a kid. Call me shallow, but I enjoy it now just as much as I did then. It feels good to feel financially secure.
When I’m asked for a sound bite one-liner/single comment about ‘taking control of your money’, encouraging others to track their net worth is my go-to reply. Without a doubt, it is the most effective tool for understanding whether you are going backwards or forwards financially.
As part of my Financial Independence Series of blog posts, Part 1 is specifically about how to track your own NET WORTH.
Below, I’ll quickly show you how I do it. It only takes a couple of minutes each month, but hands down, it's the most simplistic yet effective way of showing us how far we have come and where we might be headed. Additionally, since I’m relatively open about our finances, I thought you might be interested in seeing our progress over the last month.
Ten years ago, I transitioned to using a simple spreadsheet. You can now Google and find numerous net worth spreadsheet templates, but when I first started tracking, the choices were limited, so I created my own basic, adjustable, and practical version, which I continue to use to this day. It still works. I use it to track our bank accounts, investments and the value of our home. I’m always tinkering with it, changing colours and adding and removing various formulas and calculations whenever I’m curious to find something out.
Additionally, I update my PocketSmith Net Worth monthly, and I also check in on my Sharesight portfolio, as it tracks not just the value, but also the growth and returns of our ETFs.
Do I need all three? Maybe not. PocketSmith would easily suffice for budgeting, but Sharesight is brilliant at calculating our investment returns. Any household CFO reading this will know that mucking around with your numbers in multiple ways is our definition of FUN. Therefore, each of these tools serves a purpose for me, and I’ve observed that most people use a variety of tools to monitor, track, and calculate. Each to their own.
Fun Fact: I also track the net worth of our almost 18-year-old daughter. I’ve tracked her growth since she was seven, and it has been interesting to monitor her progress and educate her, sharing the information as a way to engage her with her finances. Jonny and I initially deposited money into her KiwiSaver and an ETF on her behalf, but as she began to earn and invest money herself, we reduced our contributions. She will be leaving home with ~$60,000 invested, plus cash savings. Proud parent moment right there! I’ll blog more about how she, Jonny, and I are preparing her to pay cash for university soon.
Below, I decided to share my own numbers. While I do me, you should do you. And it honestly does not matter how you decide to track your own net worth; what matters is that you do, and that you discuss it with your partner, if you are in a relationship. And that you do it consistently over time. I’m fortunate in that I’ve seen how countless others track their net worth, and I can tell you that no two are the same. Your financial situation is unique to you; therefore, the way you measure it will be unique as well.
Pick a date, any date, as long as it's the same each month
On the 1st of every new month, I log into each bank account and investment account and enter the total into my spreadsheet.
Then, now that I have a lot of data, I play around with a few basic formulas to see how we are progressing.
I ask myself a question
I like to know how we are tracking compared to the start of the year, as well as how we compare to the same month in the previous year. I also like to track how much we have contributed to our investment, compared to the growth in our investments from share market returns.
Recently, I wanted to know how much our investments have grown over the last three years. By subtracting the money we have contributed, our investments have increased by $195,000, or $65,000 per year. Which I find interesting. It tells me that our investments are working. Given that I know what we spend each month, I wanted to know how much our investments could currently yield if we were to retire. Currently, if we sell off ~5% of our investments annually, we could generate a steady income of $2,800 per month. It is still not enough to live on, but we are making progress. Also interesting.
Time for a tidy up
My monthly check-in is also an opportunity to review our bank accounts and transfer funds, monitor our sinking fund balances and contributions, and ensure all our bills are set up for automatic payment, among other tasks. If we are finished with a sinking fund, I’ll repurpose that account for something else, and/or I’ll open and close new accounts as needed.
Update PocketSmith
Then, I like to update our net worth balances in PocketSmith so that our overall net worth is kept up to date and we can see in one image where we stand. While I love to dig into the minute details, Jonny prefers this big-picture approach. I’ve met too many people who bamboozle/bore their partners with dry data, and I encourage you to find a way to present the same information to them in a way that makes sense.
A nice, clean image in PocketSmith showing Jonny where we stand this month.
This all happens in the early hours of the first of every month. And when poor old Jonny stumbles out of bed in search of his first coffee of the day, I’m wide awake, armed with information which I start telling him all about. Poor Jonny. When we are both ready, we discuss our finances, also known as a monthly financial meeting.
Paint a picture
I am also continuing to add to a graph that I have been working on for years. It serves no purpose and is ‘just because’ it's interesting to see our visual progress. When you are starting and trying to gain some momentum, graphing your progress will give you a mental boost to keep going. And again, it presents complex data in a simple way.
My Net Worth Spreadsheet
Without further ado, here is my updated net worth spreadsheet for October 1st 2025. For clarity, I’ve simplified it and shown only one month, adding notes to explain what you are seeing. I think you will get the idea. My graph also uses colour to mark out key areas I’m interested in:
Net Worth Spreadsheet for October 1st 2025.
What might you learn from this?
I certainly go out on a limb when I lay our financial lives bare like this, but I know it's helpful to other people who have no one else to bounce ideas off. So, take from it what is useful, and let the rest go.
Mocking up a net worth spreadsheet to show you an example of how to do it made me realise more than ever just how much we have come to rely on our sinking funds to ensure we have money where we need it, when we need it. And while we may wipe out the entire balance of a fund from time to time (as we did with our Health Sinking Fund in September and car repairs earlier in the year), with a never-ceasing weekly top-up, they rebuild themselves. Use sinking funds; they are a magical savings tool that has been immensely helpful in ensuring we have money for everyday spending and money to invest.
Currently, we move $930 a week into various sinking funds ($500 of which will be invested). It is a lot, but by moving it into its own account, with a specific purpose, we give ourselves clarity. Dealing with one bank account, or one pot of money meant for a myriad of purposes, requires too much mental math. Additionally, you risk holding too much cash, which is money that could be invested.
You can measure and track anything you want: debt, side hustle income, business income, YTD income: all sorts of things that I’ve not included here.
I also run a second spreadsheet that tracks The Happy Saver bank accounts, which are essentially the same as our personal accounts, with an emergency fund, holiday pay savings, and various sinking funds for future expenses.
If you have debt, just add a column for it.
While I note down my bank account balances, I’m not really tracking their progress over time. What is more important is that there is money there when I need it. Plus, I note them down more so that I remember that I have them. It is easy to lose track of bank accounts and investments, especially if you frequently relocate to other countries or change jobs. This way, in one place, we always have an up-to-date list of where our money is. You would be surprised how many forgotten accounts people discover when they start tracking their net worth!
But Ruth, why do you include your house in your net worth?
Is our home an asset? Strictly speaking, NO. All it does is cost us money. However, it has increased in value (we paid $435,000 for it in 2011), and it serves as a store of wealth for us, with a current value of approximately $970,000. I track its value, but I keep it separate from our investments. It is on our radar to sell our home, buy a smaller, less expensive home, and invest the remaining money in our ETF. Therefore, accounting for our home in our Net Worth makes sense to us at the moment. I see a time when I remove it from our spreadsheet completely.
It’s personal, you do you! The 2025 Rebel Finance School free course does a great job of helping you think about what to include and exclude in your Net Worth.
End of month wrap-up
For us, at our stage in our personal finance journey, our focus is on increasing our income (which I track), reducing our expenses (which I track), investing as much as we can each month (which I track), and getting our Investment Total (which I track) as high as we can.
Do you get what I’m on about here? I track and maintain basic records of what we have and where we have it, which allows me to project forward what we are likely to have in the future, based on current investment returns and personal behaviour. It is an inexact science, but it's the best chance you have of understanding the complex evolving web that is your financial life.
A basic system WORKS, and it is the system that I’ve devised and am perfectly happy with.
Find tools that work for you. I use my own spreadsheet, PocketSmith, to help me budget and gain an overview of my daily, monthly, and annual money management, and Sharesight to check whether our investments are actually growing in value above and beyond our contributions (yes, they are).
Had I not done any of this, and you asked me how I ‘felt’ we were doing financially, I’d probably default to what I hear on the news: not that well. But reality is different from ‘feeling’. My numbers indicate that we are performing well and are on track to continue doing so.
So, whether you track your finances using a pen and paper or an online tool you have found and like, I don’t mind. What I do mind is that you take control of your finances. And that you get to geek out and have a little fun with it like I do.
