Net Worth Calculator
Calculating your net worth is not a complicated process. For both individuals and businesses, net worth is simply the total value of your cash, investments, and other assets minus everything that you owe (your liabilities). Some programs like Quicken tell you your net worth, but that is only accurate if you include all your accounts, every asset, and every loan within the software. That's not as simple as it sounds, so I created this free Net Worth Calculator in Excel to help you easily list everything in a single spot.
Net Worth Calculator
for Excel and OpenOffice
Description
This simple spreadsheet helps you calculate your personal net worth by providing a ready-to-use list of asset and liability categories. You don't need to enter your personal information on the web. You can save this spreadsheet to your computer, and work offline.
For more information about assets and liabilities, continue reading below the download block.
Net Worth Calculation
Net Worth = Assets - Liabilities
When talking about assets and liabilities, we aren't talking about personality or character traits. :-) Your financial net worth is calculated by subtracting your financial liabilities from your financial assets.
Assets
Your financial assets include the cash in your checking and savings accounts, certificates of deposit, life insurance cash value, retirement accounts, the value of your home and real estate investments, stocks, bonds, mutual funds, treasury bills, silver and gold bullion, and even personal property such as cars, jewelry, art, and collectibles. Basically, anything of value that could be converted to cash. You can also include the money owed to you by other people (but only if you think they are going to pay you back). In the calculator, this would be the "Notes and Accounts Receivable" category.
Some people prefer to not list their home or personal property because they wouldn't want to sell it. But, one of the reasons for listing your home or automobile is that these assets can be used as collateral when applying for loans, or if you really had to sell them, you could. I include my home in the calculation because I also include the mortgage in the liabilities.
You can also include your future retirement income from pensions and social security as assets. As recommended by Eric Tyson in Personal Finance for Dummies, this can be done by multiplying your expected monthly retirement income by the number of months you expect to receive that income. You could enter the value as a formula, such as =income*240, where 240 is the number of months and income is the monthly income.
Liabilities
Your financial liabilities include everything that you owe, such as credit card debt, student loans, auto loans, money (notes) owed to other people, and real estate mortgages.
If you find that you have a lot of liabilities (debt), you may be interested in our debt reduction calculator. It will help you develop a debt reduction plan using strategies such as the debt snowball method or highest-interest first approach. You may also want to try the credit card payoff calculator.
References
- Personal Finance for Dummies, by Eric Tyson
- Net Worth on wikipedia.org