Start with the only formula that matters
Net worth = everything the family owns − everything it owes. That is the entire mathematics. The difficulty was never the formula; it is honestly listing both sides across accounts held by different family members, in different institutions, compounding at different times.
A household where one spouse holds the mutual funds, the other runs the PPF, parents hold gold, and a home loan sits on the third floor of paperwork has five partial pictures pretending to be one. Write down every member before writing down any number.
What counts as an asset
List every holding at its current value, never at what you paid:
- Financial investments — stocks and ETFs at today's price, mutual funds at today's NAV, SGBs and sovereign gold bonds
- Retirement accounts — EPF balance (check UAN), PPF balance, NPS corpus, gratuity if vested
- Deposits — FDs at accrued value, RDs, savings balances
- Physical assets — gold jewellery at today's rate, property at conservative resale estimate (not the broker's fantasy)
- Receivables — money lent to others you realistically expect back
Skip: the car (a depreciating consumer good unless you run a business with it), gadgets, and the sum insured of insurance policies — cover is a promise, not an asset.
What counts as a liability
- Home loan outstanding — today's principal, not the original sanction
- Vehicle, personal and education loans — current outstanding
- Credit card balances carried beyond the free period
- Borrowings from family or friends that you genuinely owe
Insurance premiums due next month are expenses, not liabilities. Future taxes are neither. Keep liabilities strictly to amounts owed today.
A worked example: the Sharma household
Four members, two incomes, one home loan:
| Item | Owner | Value (₹) |
|---|---|---|
| Mutual funds | Rajesh + Pooja | 82,45,000 |
| Stocks & ETFs | Rajesh | 45,83,000 |
| EPF (both UANs) | Rajesh + Pooja | 23,65,000 |
| PPF | Pooja | 15,20,000 |
| Gold & SGBs | Family | 14,35,000 |
| Fixed deposits | Family | 11,20,000 |
| Total assets | 1,92,68,000 | |
| Home loan outstanding | Joint | (32,45,000) |
| Car loan outstanding | Rajesh | (8,04,000) |
| Total liabilities | (40,49,000) |
Net worth = ₹1,92,68,000 − ₹40,49,000 = ₹1,52,19,000. One honest number. Now the useful part: repeat next month and watch the direction.
Why the trend beats the total
A snapshot flatters or frightens; only movement informs. A family at ₹80L growing ₹60,000 monthly is healthier than one parked at ₹2Cr going nowhere. Track the delta every month and ask what moved it — a bonus deployed well, a loan prepayment, or a market month that will mean-revert. This is precisely why we built daily snapshots into our net worth tracker: the arithmetic above should happen while you sleep, not on a spreadsheet Sunday you keep postponing.
Five mistakes that quietly corrupt the number
- Recording EPF at contribution instead of balance with interest — it is usually the second-largest family asset
- Counting the original home loan amount instead of today's outstanding principal
- Valuing property at purchase-plus-sentiment rather than a defensible resale band
- Forgetting the spouse's entirely separate folios — the most common miss in two-income households
- Updating once a year and calling it tracked; stale numbers drive bad decisions with total confidence
The monthly ritual (or the automated alternative)
Manual route: first Sunday of the month, pull EPF passbook, fund NAVs, FD maturity values and loan statements, update the sheet, note the delta. Total cost: about ninety minutes you will eventually stop spending. Automated route: put every member's holdings into one dashboard that reprices daily, keeps 90-day history on the free plan, and shows each family member only what they should see. Either way, start this month — the first data point matters more than the perfect system.
Frequently asked questions
What is a good net worth in India by age?
Should my home be included in net worth?
How often should a family calculate net worth?
Is net worth the same as salary or savings?
Stop recalculating. Start tracking.
TrackMyNetWorth turns everything in this guide into a living dashboard — every asset, loan and family member with daily net worth snapshots. Free to start.
Keep reading
- Written for Indian households
- No jargon
- Regularly reviewed