A net worth tracker that counts the flat, the gold and the coins
Bank apps count what the bank can see. Portfolio apps count securities. Here is what it takes to put property, metals, crypto, vehicles and money you are owed into one number, and where the automatic part stops.
Ask most finance apps what you are worth and they answer a narrower question: what is in the accounts they can see.
That is fine if your wealth is a current account and a pension. It is wrong for most people over thirty, whose balance sheet has a flat with a mortgage against it, a car, some gold, a few coins, a workplace pension and a friend who still owes them money.
Getting those into one number is not hard in principle. Each one needs a quantity, a price and a currency. The work is in deciding which of those three the app can fetch and which you have to say.
What "counts" has to meanLink to this section
A net worth figure is only useful if three things hold.
It is valued today. A flat entered at what you paid in 2019 is not a valuation, it is a memory.
It is in one currency. If the gold is priced in dollars, the flat is in euros and the salary is in pounds, a total that ignores exchange rates is a made-up number.
It moves over time. A single figure tells you nothing. The shape of the line is the whole point.
What can be priced for you, and what cannotLink to this section
This is where apps quietly differ, so here is exactly where our line falls.
Priced automatically:
- Crypto, from CoinGecko.
- Stocks and funds, from public quote feeds (Yahoo Finance, with Alpha Vantage as a fallback).
- Gold, silver, platinum and palladium, from metals.dev. Prices arrive per troy ounce and are converted to the unit you hold, so 200 grams and 6.4 troy ounces are the same holding.
Valued by you:
- Property. No app can tell you what your flat is worth. Ours asks you for a number and keeps every one you enter, so the chart shows the step when you revalued rather than pretending it drifted.
- Vehicles, the same way.
- Anything else - a stake in a business, a watch, a plot of land - as an asset with a value you set.
That division is the honest one. An app that claims to price your house is either guessing from a public index or quietly leaving the figure where you put it.
Debts and money owed to youLink to this section
Two things routinely missing from a net worth screen:
What you owe. A mortgage, a car loan and a card balance are accounts like any other, entered as what is outstanding, and subtracted.
What you are owed. The deposit with the landlord, the money lent to a brother, the invoice a client has not paid. Hundo tracks these per person and counts them in the total, which is usually the difference between a net worth figure you believe and one you argue with.
Every holding keeps its own currencyLink to this section
An asset is not only a quantity and a price. It is a quantity and a price in a currency, and often bought with a different one.
Gold priced in dollars, bought with euros. A US fund held by someone who spends in pounds. A flat in one country, a salary in another.
Hundo stores each holding in its own currency and converts for display, in 166 currencies. That matters more than it sounds, because it is what lets the app answer the question underneath:
How much of this month's change was the market, and how much was the exchange rate?
The net worth page splits any period into those two parts. For a single investment, the currency-adjusted return calculator does the same sum in your browser, with nothing to sign up for.
What it will not doLink to this section
- It will not connect to your bank, your broker or your exchange. There is no bank login anywhere in the product, by design.
- It will not value your house for you.
- It will not price a collectable, a private shareholding or anything else without a public market.
If you want a portfolio tool that logs into your broker and reconciles every trade, that is a different product and you should buy one.
Where to startLink to this section
Add the accounts first, then the assets, then the debts. Most people are ten minutes from a real figure, because the hard part was never the typing - it was that no single app would hold all of it.
Two free calculators, no account needed, if you want to try the arithmetic first:
- Add up a net worth across several currencies at today's rates.
- Compare a net worth with the median for your age, from official surveys in five places.