Net Worth Calculator: Assets Minus Debts, Free and Private

This calculator runs entirely in your browser: nothing you type is uploaded, stored or sent anywhere, and it keeps working with the connection off. That matters more here than anywhere else on this site. Net worth asks for the most sensitive numbers a person has, the savings balance, what is left on the mortgage, what the cards are quietly carrying. None of it leaves the tab. Close the page and it is gone. What comes back is one figure, assets minus debts, the two totals behind it, and a separate liquid line that turns out to be the number you use most.

How to use it

1. Start with the currency symbol. It is cosmetic and only changes how the results print. Work in one currency throughout: if you hold money or a property abroad, convert at today's rate before typing, and note the rate you used so next quarter is comparable.
2. Work down the left column: cash, current account, savings, investments, property, vehicle, other assets. Use today's balances rather than remembered ones. Anything that does not apply stays at zero, and a renter with no car types zero twice and loses nothing.
3. The right column wants outstanding balances. Credit cards, overdraft, loans, student loan, mortgage, buy now pay later, other debts. Not monthly payments. Confusing the two is the single most common mistake on this page and it puts the total out by an order of magnitude.
4. The big number at the bottom is total assets minus total debts, green when positive and red when negative. Under it sit total assets, total debts and the liquid line, with a note giving debts as a percentage of assets, or the amount by which debts exceed assets when the total is negative.
5. Write the figure down with the date. One net worth number says almost nothing. Two, a quarter apart, say everything.

What to put in each box

Cash means notes in a wallet, a jar, a drawer. Most people have less than they think, and it is the fastest box on the page. If cash is a real part of your week, how to track cash spending covers keeping the figure current between checks. The current account box wants the cleared balance today, not the balance after the rent leaves. Overdrawn? Put zero here and the overdrawn amount in the overdraft box on the right, so the two sides stay honest.

Savings covers every account holding money set aside: instant-access accounts, fixed-term deposits, any cash sitting in a tax-sheltered wrapper. A deposit locked up for eighteen months is still an asset. Just remember it when you read the liquid line.

Investments are brokerage accounts, funds, shares and, if you choose to include them, pensions and workplace schemes. Use the current value your provider shows, not the amount you have contributed. For plenty of people in their forties the workplace pension is the largest number on the page, and leaving it out makes the picture look bleaker than it is. Others exclude pensions on purpose, because that money cannot be touched for decades and a big pension balance makes a total look comfortable while the current account is empty. Both are defensible. What is not defensible is counting it one quarter and dropping it the next, because then the change between the two readings measures nothing but your bookkeeping.

For property, use what the home would fetch today, based on recent comparable sales: the same street or block, the same number of bedrooms, sold in the last six months. Not the asking price of the flat down the road, which is a hope rather than a transaction, and not the figure you would need to break even. Where comparable sales are hard to find, take the lowest plausible number. Property is usually the largest entry, so ten percent of optimism there swamps everything else on the page.

A vehicle goes in at trade-in value, never the price paid. Cars lose a large share of their value the moment they leave the forecourt and keep going from there. Look up the trade-in figure for the same model, year and mileage, or check what identical cars are actually selling for privately. If the car is on finance, the outstanding balance belongs in the loans box, so a car worth less than its remaining finance drags the total down. That is not a flaw in the calculator. That is the position.

Other assets is a trap more often than a help. It is for things with a real resale market and a checkable price: a second property, a collection with published auction results, a business stake with a recent valuation, cryptocurrency at today's price. Not furniture, clothes, electronics, kitchen equipment or the contents of the garage. If you would not sell it and you could not name a buyer, leave it out. Padding this box makes the total bigger and the reading less useful, and the only person fooled is the one looking at the screen.

Every box on the debt side wants the outstanding balance. Credit cards: the full statement balance, including anything parked on a zero-percent promotional rate, which is still owed. Overdraft: how far down you currently are. Loans: personal loans, car finance, family loans you intend to repay. Student loan: the outstanding balance, even where repayment is income-contingent and the debt may eventually be written off. You can note that quirk separately; today it is a real liability. Mortgage: the principal outstanding, which the annual statement gives. Buy now, pay later: the total still to pay across every provider, which is easy to undercount because it lives in four apps. Other debts: tax owed, arrears, anything else with a due date.

There is one thing this page deliberately will not do, and people ask for it often: project the figure forward. No growth rate, no inflation adjustment, no "at this pace you will be worth X by 2035". Every one of those needs an assumed return, and the assumed return decides the answer. A calculator that lets you pick seven percent and admire the result is entertainment. Fourteen boxes and one subtraction is the whole of it, and it is honest because it is small.

Why the liquid figure matters more month to month

The calculator shows a separate liquid line covering only cash, current account and savings. Between quarters, that is the number worth watching.

A large net worth driven by property and pensions does not pay for a boiler repair. It does not cover a month of reduced hours, a vet bill or a car that fails its test. Those get paid out of the liquid line, and a household can sit on a healthy six-figure net worth and still put a £600 repair on a credit card because everything it owns is locked up. That is how a strong balance sheet quietly turns into expensive debt.

So read the two numbers as answers to different questions. Net worth answers "where am I over years". Liquid answers "what survives a bad month". The second one moves fast, responds to what you do between now and payday, and is what most of this site is about. If the liquid figure would not cover a typical unexpected expense, the emergency fund calculator sizes the gap, and how to make a monthly budget that sticks is where the money to close it comes from.

The percentage note under the main figure is the third useful reading. Debts at ten percent of assets and debts at eighty percent describe very different lives even when the net figure is identical, because the second is far more exposed to a fall in asset values. Watch that percentage across quarters and you learn whether the total is improving because assets grew or because debts shrank. The second one is usually the half you actually controlled.

A negative number is a starting point, not a verdict

A negative net worth is common, and in two situations it is close to expected.

The first is graduation. Student debt lands in full on day one while the earnings it was supposed to buy arrive over decades. A graduate with a large loan and a small savings account will show a substantially negative figure, and nothing about that is a failure. National statistics agencies see the same pattern: wealth by age curves start low or negative and rise steadily, which is why single-figure comparisons across ages are so misleading.

The second is a new mortgage. Buy a home with a small deposit and the mortgage sits on the balance sheet at full size from the first month, while the property value is roughly what you paid and the transaction costs are gone. The first years of repayment go mostly to interest, so the principal barely moves. Many new homeowners show a figure near zero or below it and then watch it climb for a decade.

What changes a negative number is not complicated, although it is rarely fast. The debt side falls as balances are repaid, and expensive debt repaid first moves the figure quickest; the debt payoff calculator gives the order and the timeline. The asset side rises when money is set aside rather than spent, which the savings goal calculator turns into a monthly amount and a date. And the figure stops sliding when new debt stops arriving, which is usually a matter of the small recurring commitments nobody counts. How to track subscriptions and recurring bills covers finding those.

If the number is negative and the debts are unmanageable rather than merely large, that is a conversation for a free debt advice service or a qualified adviser, not a calculator. This page can tell you the size of the gap. It cannot tell you what to do about your particular one.

How often to recalculate

Quarterly, on the same day each quarter.

Monthly feels more diligent and is usually worse. The assets that make up most of a net worth figure (property, pensions, long-term investments, loan principals) move slowly, so a monthly reading mostly captures the timing of your salary and the date of your card statement. You end up reacting to noise. Four readings a year are enough to see a trend, spaced far enough apart that something real has happened between them, and rare enough that each one still feels worth the twenty minutes.

Picking a fixed day matters more than the interval. The first Sunday of January, April, July and October works because it is easy to remember and never falls on a payday, which would otherwise inflate every reading in the same direction. Whatever you choose, keep the same valuation rules each time: the same property comparison method, the same decision about pensions, the same treatment of a car. Consistency between readings is what makes the difference meaningful. If you change a rule, note it, and expect that quarter's change to be partly bookkeeping.

Keep the readings somewhere plain. Four numbers and four dates in a note is enough. The glossary entry on net worth covers the definition; the value is in the series, not any single entry.

Three balance sheets

Take a renter with student debt. Cash 200, current account 1,400, savings 2,800, investments 0, property 0, vehicle 2,000, other 0, giving total assets of 6,400. On the debt side: credit cards 900, student loan 28,000, buy now pay later 250, everything else zero, so total debts of 29,150. Net worth comes out at negative 22,750, and the calculator says so in as many words. The liquid line is 4,400, and that is the figure that matters this month. It covers a few weeks of essential spending. The student loan, repaid out of income over decades, changes almost nothing about the next year. The useful work here is the 1,150 of card and buy now, pay later balances, not the 28,000 everyone stares at.

Now a new homeowner. Cash 300, current account 2,100, savings 3,500, investments 11,000, property 265,000, vehicle 6,500: total assets 288,400. Credit cards 1,800, loans 9,200, mortgage 248,000, so 259,000 owed. Net worth is 29,400, and debts are 90 percent of assets. The headline looks solid. The liquid line is 5,900 against a mortgaged house, and the ratio note is the more honest reading of the two. Knock ten percent off the property and 26,500 comes out of the net figure, leaving 2,900. Priority is the liquid line, then the 11,000 of non-mortgage debt.

The third case is mid-career. Cash 400, current account 3,200, savings 14,000, investments 96,000 including a workplace pension, property 310,000, vehicle 4,000: total assets 427,600, against a mortgage of 121,000 and nothing else. Net worth 306,600, debts 28 percent of assets. Almost all of that total is property and pension, neither of which can be spent this decade. The liquid line, 17,600, is the part that behaves like money, and the quarterly question is whether it is growing. The other 289,000 will move with markets and house prices whatever happens between now and Friday.

Three very different balance sheets, a third of a million between the top and the bottom, and in every one of them the number that decides how the next six months feel is the liquid line.

Where Cash Book fits

Cash Book covers the everyday half of this page, and it is worth being exact about which half.

The Accounts screen holds your cash, card and savings accounts, each with its own balance, and shows one net-worth number across them at the top. Moving money between them is logged as a transfer like any other transaction, so the individual balances stay right without a second app. That covers the first three asset boxes and, for card balances, part of the debt side. The liquid picture, in other words, and the short-term debt around it.

What it does not do: there is no bank or card sync, no investment tracking, no property valuation and no automatic import of anything. Cash Book never connects to a bank. Balances are what you log, which is the trade for data that lives on the phone with optional iCloud sync to your own Apple account rather than on somebody's server. For a full balance sheet, this calculator once a quarter is the right tool, and the app is the thing that keeps the everyday numbers true in between.

Between quarters, the parts that move are spending and saving. Budgets put a cap under the Home figure so the savings transfer survives the month, Insights shows which tags changed against last month, and how to track expenses on iPhone covers getting the logging habit to stick in the first place. For the split between saving, essentials and everything else, the 50/30/20 budget calculator gives a starting shape.

Fill in the fourteen boxes, read the liquid line before the headline, write both down with today's date, and come back in three months. The number on its own is trivia. The series is the only part that tells you anything.

Get Cash Book on the App StoreFree for 7 days. $19.99 once for lifetime.

Get Cash Book on the App StoreFree for 7 days. $19.99 once for lifetime.