What is my net worth?

Net worth is a stock, not a flow. It is what a photograph of your finances would show today: every balance you could sell or spend, less every balance you owe, with no reference at all to what you earn or what you spend. Two people with the same salary can sit on opposite sides of zero here, and two people with the same figure on this page can have nothing in common in their paychecks.

Two entry rules do most of the work. Assets go in at what they would sell for now, not what you paid, which is why the vehicles line on the example sheet reads $18,000 rather than a sticker price. Debts go in at the payoff balance on the statement, not the amount originally borrowed. Anything you neither own nor owe stays off entirely, which is why a leased car appears on neither side.

At the example inputs this page ships with, that comes to $568,000 owned against $323,000 owed, so a net worth of $245,000. Those inputs are a placeholder balance sheet chosen to make the figure legible, not a claim about anybody. Replace them with your own and everything on the page recomputes as you type.

The headline figure is the least interesting thing the calculator produces, because a single number cannot tell you whether it is reachable. Here are three balance sheets that all land on exactly $245,000.

Read across. The house-heavy sheet carries 82% of its net worth in a property, so the figure outside the home is $45,000, and 55% of every asset dollar is borrowed. The sheet with no house at all is the same $245,000 with 0% borrowed against it. Neither is better. They behave completely differently in a bad month, and that is what the three figures under the result are for.

The strictest version of the question, what could you reach this week, is cash plus taxable investments: $40,000 at the example inputs, or $36,000 once the card balances come off it. If that number is thin, the next page is the emergency fund calculator, which turns your own monthly spending into the months of runway it buys.

Most net worth calculators end with a percentile: you are ahead of some share of people your age. This one does not, and the omission is deliberate rather than an oversight.

There is exactly one defensible source for that comparison in the United States, the Federal Reserve Board's Survey of Consumer Finances, and using it honestly means quoting a specific published wave, stating the year, saying whether the figure is a median or a mean, and being explicit that the survey measures households rather than individuals. Those distinctions change the answer by a lot: household and individual are not the same denominator, and a mean sits far above a median in a distribution this skewed. This site does not carry that table yet, and a percentile typed from memory would be a made up number wearing a Federal Reserve badge, which is worse than no number at all.

So the page gives you the figures it can stand behind: your total, its composition, and the three figures under it. When the survey data is sourced and dated properly, the comparison will appear here with the wave it came from named on the page. Until then, the useful comparison is against your own sheet from last year, which is the only one that reflects decisions you actually made.

The tax inside your investments. The taxable line goes in at market value, which counts unrealized gains at full face value even though selling them triggers a bill. A $25,000 brokerage balance that is half gain is not $25,000 of spendable money, and the difference depends on your holding period and your income: the capital gains calculator prices it. The same goes the other way for a traditional 401(k) or IRA, where the whole balance is pre-tax and the withdrawal is ordinary income.

What selling the house would cost. Home equity here is simply the value you entered minus the mortgage. It does not net out an agent commission, transfer taxes, title and escrow fees, or the repairs a buyer asks for, and those come off the top of the sale price rather than off the equity. The home value itself is an estimate no matter who produced it, which is why the calculator ships a table showing what your answer becomes if the estimate is off by ten or twenty percent in either direction.

That a house is not spendable. Equity in the home you live in is a real asset and a terrible checking account. You cannot draw on it without selling the place, taking a home equity line, or refinancing, and every one of those has a cost and a qualification test. The page reports the share of your net worth sitting in home equity for exactly this reason, and warns when it passes seventy percent.

Interest rates, and therefore urgency. Net worth treats a $4,000 card balance and $4,000 of a mortgage as the same dollar of debt. They are not remotely the same problem. Ordering your debts by what they cost is the debt payoff calculator, which asks for a rate and a minimum payment on each one.

Not moving money between the columns. Paying $4,000 of card balances with $4,000 of cash takes the example from $245,000 to $245,000, because the asset side and the debt side fell by the same amount. This surprises people, and it is the clearest proof that net worth is a scoreboard rather than a strategy: the payment was still the right move, for reasons this calculator cannot see.

Three things do move it. Saving more than you spend, which adds to an asset line with nothing subtracted against it. Asset prices, which is why the calculator prices a market move across your taxable and retirement balances and a valuation change on the home. And amortization, which is the quiet one: the principal portion of a mortgage payment moves money from the debt side to the equity side without you deciding anything. Retire $6,000 of the example mortgage and net worth goes from $245,000 to $251,000, with home equity rising from $135,000 to $141,000. The mortgage payoff calculator shows how fast that happens on your own loan, and what an extra payment each month changes.

Which is why this figure is worth recording rather than watching. Write it down once a quarter with the composition next to it, and the trend answers questions the level never will. If you are aiming the trend at something specific, the FIRE number calculator turns your spending into the target, and compound interest projects the investment lines forward at a rate you choose. If the home line is a plan rather than a deed, house affordability starts from your cash and prices what a lender would approve.

This calculator is built to be used without a browser. Every input is a query parameter on this page, and the same parameters on the JSON twin return the complete answer as a document.

GET /tools/net-worth.json?cash=20000&taxable=50000&retirement=120000&home=450000&mortgage=300000

The response carries inputs after parsing and clamping, result with total assets, total liabilities, net worth, home equity, net worth without the home, the debt-to-asset ratio, the share of net worth in home equity, per-line assets and liabilities composition with each line's share of its own side, sensitivity tables by home value and by market move, and no percentile or benchmark of any kind, drivers ranked by effect with a plain sentence each, assumptions that say for every field whether you supplied it and name the source when the default came from one, sources with a URL and an as-of date for each source the tool cites, which is an empty list on the calculators whose every default is an example input rather than a published figure, warnings, a disclaimer, and in tool the canonicalUrl and jsonUrl that carry only your non-default parameters. The canonical URL is the answer's permanent address; use it when you cite the number.

Parameters, all optional, in any order:

• cash ($), default $15,000.
• taxable ($), default $25,000.
• retirement ($), default $90,000.
• home ($), default $420,000.
• vehicles ($), default $18,000.
• otherAssets ($), default $0.
• mortgage ($), default $285,000.
• studentLoans ($), default $22,000.
• autoLoans ($), default $12,000.
• creditCards ($), default $4,000.
• otherDebts ($), default $0.

Values accept plain numbers and loose human formats such as 100k, $100,000, or 6.5%. Unknown parameters are ignored, values outside a field's range are clamped and reported in warnings, and the endpoint never fails on bad input. Responses are cacheable for a day; the defaults change when their sources publish, and tool.version changes when the method does.

This calculator cites no external source, on purpose, and it publishes no benchmark. Every default is an example balance sheet chosen to make the composition figure legible, not a statistic about what anybody holds, and the arithmetic is a subtraction you can check by hand in the panel under the result. Deliberately absent: any percentile, median, or average net worth by age. That comparison requires the Federal Reserve Board's Survey of Consumer Finances quoted from a specific dated wave, this site does not carry that table, and inventing one would be citing ourselves.

Carlo is a personal finance agent. It knows your accounts, debts, and goals, so instead of a snapshot you retype every quarter it can keep the balance sheet current, show you the trend rather than the level, and connect the composition to the decisions that produced it. Text it the question.

ask carlo anything(415) 376-5678