Net worth, month over month
Your single most important metric, what it does and doesn't tell you, and how to keep it from lying to you in good years.
5 min readPublished May 4, 2026
What goes in: everything, at market
Cash, deposits, investments at current price, gold at spot, property at a defensible estimate, debts as full balances. Don't round, don't exclude, don't smooth. The number's only useful if it's complete. A month of incomplete tracking poisons the trend line for a year.
Look at the trend, not the level
Whether you're at thirty thousand or three million is largely a function of when you started. What matters is the slope. A rising line in a flat market is income discipline. A flat line in a rising market is a leak. Stare at the slope, not the dot.
Break it down once a quarter
Once every three months, split the change into contributions versus market movement. Contributions are the part you control — that's the score on the work you did. Market movement is the part you have to ride. Tracking them separately stops you from celebrating luck and beating yourself up over weather.
Don't peek daily
Daily checking trains the wrong reflex — it teaches you to react to noise. Monthly checking is enough granularity to spot drift, infrequent enough to not become a hobby. Net worth is a tide, not a stock ticker.
More in Monthly tracking
Monthly tracking
The Calm Money Habit: A Year of Tracking, Reviewing, Adjusting
How small, repeatable rituals beat clever optimisation over a decade — and the specific weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual rhythms that turn financial chaos into quiet competence.
22 min readMay 14, 2026
Monthly tracking
The fifteen-minute monthly review
A repeatable end-of-month ritual. Three numbers, two questions, one decision. That's the whole thing.
4 min readMay 9, 2026