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.