Workbook — Investing · Created October 4, 2026 · 3 min read
Net Worth, Year by Year
One snapshot a year. Five of them tell you which way you are moving.
Income is what comes in. Net worth is what stays: everything you own, minus everything you owe. This net worth spreadsheet records that number once a year, one column per year, with a notes column for why it moved — so that in five years you can see whether the plan is working, not just whether one year felt good.
What This Workbook Does
- One column per year. Six years side by side, plus a notes column for what moved and why. Change the years in the header row and everything below follows.
- Assets in four groups: cash and equivalents (checking, savings, the emergency fund, certificates and money market); retirement accounts (an employer plan, traditional and Roth IRAs, a health savings account); education savings, one row per child; and property — the home, vehicles, and any other personal property you would actually sell. Each group has spare rows.
- Liabilities: the mortgage, a home equity loan or line, auto loans, student loans, credit card balances carried, and anything else you owe.
- Calculated for you: net worth for each year, the change from the year before in dollars and in percent, debt as a percentage of assets, and liquid assets as months of living costs. Across the whole period it works out the total change and the compound annual growth rate.
- Clear cell colors. Light-blue cells are the ones you fill in. Grey cells with orange figures are calculated, and a legend at the bottom of the sheet says so.
How to Use It
- Change the year numbers in the header row to match your own range.
- Pick one date and use it every year. The first weekend in January works well, because the year-end statements have arrived.
- Enter balances, not contributions. This is a photograph of one day, not a record of money flowing in.
- Value the house from the county assessment or a recent comparable sale, not from a listing site’s estimate. Value vehicles at a trade-in figure, not a private-sale figure.
- Enter your monthly cost of living once — housing plus everything else, excluding savings — so the liquid-months row has something to divide by.
- Write a note whenever a line moves for a reason: a new roof, a second car, a rollover. In five years that note is the only thing that will make a strange year make sense.
- Read the change rows, not the single year. Then watch two ratios: debt as a percentage of assets, and the liquid-months row. Those catch trouble earlier than the net worth line does.
What It Will Not Do
A net worth figure is only as good as the estimates inside it, and the home and the vehicles are the two lines people flatter — which defeats the point of keeping the record. The workbook does not pull balances or values from anywhere; it adds up what you type. Balances in pre-tax retirement accounts are counted at face value, before the income tax that withdrawals will owe. The percentage-change row and the growth rate are left blank whenever the starting figure is zero or negative, because a percentage measured from a negative base is meaningless. Why the number matters more than income is covered in The Young Adult Years.