As part of my five part series on family financial management, today’s post is about net worth tracking.

One of the biggest questions that I have turned my mind to over the past eighteen months or so is our family’s net worth – that is – our family balance sheet. It’s a bit like putting a business lens over your family finances and seeing whether the family company is actually growing its asset base.

So net worth tracking – what is it, and how do you do it?

It sounds so fancy, but simply put, your family net worth is calculated by deducting your liabilities from your assets, and bingo – that is your family net worth.

So, why should I go to the trouble of working out what our net worth value is? Five simple reasons:

1. At any given point in time, you can see whether you are growing your family assets and achieving your financial goals. You can also critically examine composition of your assets, for example and see whether you have any over exposure in terms of risk that you may want to readjust.
2. You can also see whether you are financially going backwards. For example if property values are falling and you are only making interest only payments on your mortgage (the principal is not reducing) you are going backwards, financially. If you want to change the situation, by tracking your net worth, you will be alerted to this situation and will be able to re-jig your finances accordingly.
3. Net worth calculations will keep you honest and real about your financial situation if you track it over time. It’s easy to redraw cash on the mortgage to pay for an overseas holiday or put a pool in (we have done this one!) and continue to dip into your redraw facility like it is free cash without any consideration of the long term financial impacts for you and your family. Watching your net worth stagnant over time as a result is an eye opener. We did this for about three years. A combination of seeing our static family balance sheet and a strong urge to spend more quality time with family and less time at work propelled us into action (the Year of Austerity) and beyond.
4. Net worth calculations are super important in retirement planning. I’ve found that being on this side of 40 has really sharpened my interest in knowing whether I will have enough money to seriously retire and focus on projects that I am actually interested in.
5. It’s important for estate planning. Perhaps for my generation, intergenerational wealth has not seemed as necessary (I’m a self-starter and have made my own way in this world financially) but for our children, market predictions on employment prospects and economic growth generally are looking a bit bleak. I’d like to think that I will have some $$ to leave all of our five kids as a back-up fund for them and their future families in times of hardship.

For the purposes of being a useful calculation, you want to not include the short term, small assets that can seriously fluctuate at any given point in time. For example, our “trading” account, where our salaries are paid into and our credit card is paid out of, can wildly fluctuate between $12k and $50 depending on what time of the month it is, and whether we have paid our credit card recently. Because this could overstate or understate our net worth position at any time, I leave it out of our calculations.

Similarly, on the liabilities side, we pay off our credit card in full every month and it could have either $2k on it, or $9k, so again, I leave it out of our net worth calculation.

If, on the other hand, the credit card was not being paid off each and every month, and had become core debt – a long standing liability – then I would definitely deduct it off the family asset balance, because by not including it, I would not be viewing the true family financial position.

So, again, in the interests of being open and transparent, for our family, I’ll share our net worth position as at today.

Six monthly I usually do a little bit of my own real estate research to estimate the value of our family home and I use our six monthly superannuation balances to calculate super. I have to say, since the Year of Austerity and paying off our mortgage, we look financially under control and I like that.

Our net worth looks something like this:

Assets

Family home                                                      $700k

Savings account                                                $ 61K

Superannuation                                               $556k

Shares                                                                  $   5k

Total                                                                      $1.322m

Minus Liabilities

Core credit card debt                                     $0

Mortgage                                                            $0

Net worth                                                           $1.322m

Now I realise for some this is as boring as bat shit. But for me, it completely motivated me to think about running our family like a business so I could absolutely understand the goal posts of what we needed to save to retire (see next fortnight’s post); what we needed to budget for in the short term and therefore how much I needed to work and most importantly HOW MUCH TIME I COULD ACTUALLY SPEND WITH MY BEAUTIFUL FAMILY and not feel guilty about whether I had planned financially for the future.

I was easily prepared to be very bored to work that all out!

Give it a go, and tell me what you think. For some it will be facing the music but the music won’t go away by ignoring it.  For others, it might be quite surprising and liberating….