Today, I realised something that is a manifestation of my cultural upbringing. In my post about Macbeth, I wonder why Macduff didn’t bring along his family when he was trying to flee from Macbeth’s pursuit. After all, the swordsmen in the Chinese martial arts dramas I used to watch would assassinate their enemies’ families so that their opponents’ children won’t be able to hunt them down and seek revenge in the future. But two Stackers mentioned that in the context of Macbeth, it would be considered drastic and crossing the line to kill off Macduff’s family.
Just wow.
What has that got to do with tracking my net worth, I hear you ask.
On my country’s personal finance site, someone asked the following question about net worth recently:
Quite a number of my countrymen replied in the affirmative. Apparently, they use Google Sheets or Microsoft Excel to record down their assets, keeping track of their net worth. It’s a norm endorsed and encouraged by our government.
The government came up with SgFinDex to make it easy and convenient for us to tally our financial assets from participating financial institutions. Insurance, fixed deposits, equities, you name it, the app has it. Unfortunately, crypto isn’t included in the picture.
On a boring afternoon, I actually signed up with SgFinDex, but didn’t finish the entire process, because any self-respecting Bitcoiner will refrain from giving so much private information to strangers, right?
Anyway, since my country is mainly Chinese and Chinese people are stereotyped to be mercenary, I assumed that everyone else in the world dutifully tracks his/her net worth. But maybe what we Singaporeans do will be considered too extreme for the rest of the world out there. Let me know!
I would assume most people who took their finances seriously would keep track of this. Personally I wouldn't upload such data to a centralized server for a number of reasons, but I keep a spreadsheet that's updated periodically including a historical plot for posterity. I keep a financial journal with goals and plans for various market conditions. It's nice to revisit every few months and see how well my plans matched my actions. I find that tracking net worth forces me to face reality and remain objective. Likewise, the process of planning/anticipating the next year or two (both my own goals and broader market conditions) and then evaluating the result once it arrives can also help moderate the worst emotional impulses that often hender financial plans.
Anyhow, the real question is: what unit do use for the denomination?
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Oh I like the point about anticipating future market conditions and calibrating my financial wealth in response to the movements. Shows a greater degree of intentionality than just tracking numbers
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241 sats \ 2 replies \ @antic 19 May
If you have a goal, recording metrics and auditing rate of progress is critical to success. Anyone not tracking their net worth is not effectively pursuing any kind of financial goal (retirement, education, freedom). I’ve been tracking net worth meticulously for over a decade.
I find it useful to track a lot of other metrics aside from dollar values of assets and debts. How much is your net worth in dollars, bitcoin, median housing units, gold, lattes? Is your net worth going up or down as a percentage of total value in the global economy (meaning are you actually doing better or worse at achieving positive value for value exchange)? There’s enough data sources now that plugging these things into a spreadsheet and tracking status once a month is a no-brainer.
Before Bitcoin was clearly the way, my retirement plan was to maintain crowd lending balances using prosper and lending club—I was making a consistent 12.5% for several years so that seemed like a great plan, until monetary debasement really took off and I found that my house was gaining 15-25% annually and the idea of holding USD debt certificates rubbed me the wrong way. You can see the distribution of assets changing over time in the top left chart (I used to bucket Bitcoin in a single crypto category and it took a while to separate it out as its own thing so most of the early “crypto” bucket was really Bitcoin, but I used to have far too much ETH and LTC back when Coinbase only had those three options).
Note that I have never held any portion of my assets in bonds and I probably never will.
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Thank you for sharing your financial journey so generously. I discovered another benefit of tracking net worth - sometimes your financial philosophies n methodologies change n on hindsight, you can’t exactly pinpoint why or when. But tracking records for you the pivot in your financial strategy
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85 sats \ 2 replies \ @Fabs 19 May
What's the point of it? I don't see the utility of putting a giant cross hair on my back.
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Ego masturbation
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I've got plenty of other outlets for that. 🌝.
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I don’t, but my wife does.
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She checks your net worth? I think mine washed she had checked mine before we married lol
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My wife has no clue what our net worth is. She is simply not that interested. Everything is in place if something happens to me. I do try to teach her a bit about finance and she is happy the kids are learning but it's not really her thing. She saves a bit in bitcoin every month and knows what our monthly bills are and how much is left on our mortgage. That's about it.
She thinks we are poor and asks when I am getting a job. I just tell her we are income statement poor not balance sheet poor. Not sure she is buying it. Haha.
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She keeps track of our networth.
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Got it. I’m just messin
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I make the money and open the jars. She does pretty much everything else.
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31 sats \ 0 replies \ @Lumor 19 May
"open the jars" 😁
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You probably swooned her with multiple haikus a day
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But not your bitcoin right, right?
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My wife tracks her net worth. I have a rough idea of what mine is, and update her periodically, usually when I attain my savings goals for the year
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In my culture these things are rarely tracked. If you know what you're worth to the penny, and establish it with neat, organized spreadsheets, that's a weakness your enemies or the government can exploit. Confusion and disorganization are prized.
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Have to admit that the first thing I thought of was Italian mafia. Haha
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That is an outrageous ethnic stereotype. True, but still outrageous.
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Yes of course. I do monthly financial statements and my kids do them as well.
Just a basic income statement and balance sheet.
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121 sats \ 0 replies \ @gmd 19 May
yeah i have a spreadsheet and update twice a month for shits and giggles to see how widely the portfolio swings with the stock market and BTC fluctuations
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Nice try, Fed. 😎
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I don't. I find it boring. It's also weird in the sense that it's a lot like staring at a wound or a trophy. I'm content knowing I don't have a wound. If I had dependents or debt or something, I might need to be more vigilant though, but I suspect even then I wouldn't nickel and dime it. I mostly try to ballpark stuff and make sure my habits put me in the black.
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When I cared about my net worth, when I was saving a lot, I mostly made sure my skills and skill level were increasing (so that I was storing value in myself), that I was routinely asking to get paid more (and prepared to do what it'd take to earn it), and that I kept my expenses as low as I could without neglecting my needs.
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SAME. F**K ALL THOSE CALCULATIONS.
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I do, started more than 10 years ago.
Here is a good talk about money: https://youtu.be/JxdUWsudi6g?si=9kOXy4-kfwSIEyx9
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Thank you! Watching it right now!
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I track and have goal amounts by when I hit certain ages. You need goals and to be able to track them!
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That’s true. I learnt from the video that @criptopanas shared: what gets tracked gets managed
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I do, i started in 2014 when I began my personal finance journey, I'd been working for 3 years at that point so I actually had some savings and wanted to figure out what I could do with it, i'd always been a good saver, but I could see it wasn't going anywhere and I needed to invest, and I went into stonks, ETFs and gold and later Bitcoin and shitcoins
I think tracking it helped me find what worked and what didn't work, and through a process of elimination i found my way back to Bitcoin
I don't track it as aggressively as I did before because the fiat number becomes less important as inflation just makes number go up, but keeping track of how much relative purchasing power I have gives me a sense of the things I can access in future, what amount of risk I can take in my business and life and if I can support my family in times of need or cover my own emergencies
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Thanks for sharing your journey!
I think knowing how much buffer we have built for unexpected contingencies is compelling reason to track our net worth.
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In some countries, tracking the networth using excel or google sheets is extremely risky due to high levels of corruption and financial fraud. Hackers, senior government employees will steal the data and misuse it for identity theft, robbing savings. One top government employee robbed the data of his female engineering classmate who he hated , and falsely claimed that the savings belonged to his goan sugar baby, twenty years younger, to get the sugar baby lucrative government job.
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This sucks. I hope it is not your reality ;(
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yes and also keep it in SATs value too
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I'm kinda use old habits. I write my finances, 'net worth or portfolio' in a diary.
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Indeed I wonder if people will use this service without having the feeling to give up privacy on that. In my case in English I think I may be worrisome about money (or bimbōshō 貧乏症). So I constantly keep track of my net worth, look at it and if it looks decreasing I avoid spending. I just bought a new computer with an Intel NUC for my Bitcoin node, but even for that I waited for 2 months to save money. Interestingly when I buy bitcoins it is the opposite, I feel released. Each bitcoin purchase is followed by the feeling that I won't live under a tent at 60yo or eat chemicals instead of food.
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I used to be obsessed with stuff like this. Saving for retirement. Investing into retirement accounts but lately I just stopped caring as much. The game is rigged. The government spends into oblivion banks charge interest on money that never existed the system is set up for you to fail at every turn l.
After a failed venture with my friend that will most likely wipeout the savings I did have I started to shift my focus on just living and keeping it simple. And it boils down to this
  1. Do I have a home I can live in rent free?
  2. Do I have BTC?
I look at my mother and she’s doing just fine with a small house and SS income to meet her needs. Same for my late grandfather. After he retired he used his pension and all he did was keep up his home and watch sports all day. Didn’t fall into this trap of needing all this money to live a good life amongst family and loved ones.
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Using gov one is definitely not recommended, first point of contact should always be another form first. not to mention they are just not gonna be flexible.
I track my asset, income, fixed cost (eg insurance, transport) in an offline excel and one other app for stock.
I try to cross check the spending every few months going through every single transaction in statement to get an overview.
That being said there's a lot of banking app that use API to help categorising spending, I just prefer doing it myself to make sure the breakdown is correct
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Yes, and I simply use an offline encrypted spreadsheet.
Eventually you realize it no longer matters.
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @OT 19 May
Sometimes I give it a quick thought and make a general estimate.
More often that I care to admit I check our bitcoin stack in its fiat value. Old habits die hard.
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Yes in Bitcoin!
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It can be good to be able to graph the value of different allocations over time for psychological impact.
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