I’ve got something embarrassing to confess. Since I got married (two years ago now!), I haven’t been tracking my net worth. Ok yeah, maybe I’m being a bit dramatic, but it’s kind of a crazy thing if you think about it.
How else do you know if you’re making any progress scrimping and saving if you’re not tracking your net worth? I track my spending (for the most part) and so does my HB, but it honestly wasn’t until I found myself reading one of Jordann’s net worth reports on My Alternate Life that it hit me. We need to start tracking our net worth immediately!
I think the reason I was so casual about it for the past two years is because of our big move to Toronto. The first year of our married lives we were more focused on starting a new life together, sticking to our meagre budget and figuring out how to excelerate our careers. We managed to survive that first year, rough as it was, but after that I think we just got used to not tracking our net worth at all.
Honestly, it was so much simpler when it was just me, I had to worry about. I was incredibly anal about tracking every little thing, especially the first year I lived on my own. Once my HB and I started doing our finances together, it just got a lot more complicated. So, I started relying more on Mint.com and felt fairly happy whenever I checked our account from time to time.
But the thing with Mint is it doesn’t give you all the information your bank does (like specifics about your investments). Also, Mint doesn’t work properly all the time. Looking at the data, some months there would be a duplicate account for some reason, or an account wouldn’t be connected which would throw all the numbers off.
We’ve been talking a lot lately about switching some of our investments to index funds and doing the whole Canadian Couch Potato thing. Before we do that, I want to make sure we know how well our investments have been performing since the new year, and also see if we actually have been saving up as much as we think we are.
If you’re wondering if this post is a segue into an announcement of future net worth reports on the blog, that’s not going to happen. I was fine opening up and letting you all know how much I’ve made in the past decade, but revealing how much I’ve got in the bank, that’s something I’ll always keep private.
I will however be going into all of our accounts at the end of each month and noting down all the numbers. It’s funny, I do something similar for my job when tracking all of our newsletter and social media numbers, I have no idea why I didn’t start doing it for my finances until right now?
I’m hoping this will not only help keep all of our finances in better order but will also serve as some much-needed motivation to stick to our budgets and continue to save as much as we can.
I always find it so tempting to spend more than I should when it’s nice and sunny out, and we definitely want to do a trip somewhere soon (possibly New York), so I think tracking our net worth before summer officially starts will definitely be a big help to us moving forward.
Do you track your net worth on a monthly basis?
