Hi !
2022 has just started and it’s time for good resolutions! Apart from the classic “I’ll do more sports“, “I’ll learn a new language” or “I’ll drink less alcohol“, I suggest you try to make good resolutions in the domain of your personal finances!
The first good resolution for 2022 that I propose to you is: calculate and follow the evolution of your net worth!
Last year, I wrote a rather complete post explaining how to calculate your net worth and I suggested you to use a home-made calculator that I had made in collaboration with Arturo Fich. Thanks to this tool, I was able to follow the evolution of my net worth throughout the year and to realize its composition.
What’s the sense in doing this?
As explained in the main post, it will allow you to have a global view of your financial assets. It is a fundamental measurement tool for anyone who wants to seriously improve the management of their personal finances! If you are rigorous, you will be able to know exactly what your wealth is made of and make better choices in terms of savings, investment or budget optimization.
Evolution of my net worth
Well, to prove to you that it works and that it’s useful, I’m going to show you some of my personal numbers! Let’s go through some interesting charts.
Overall net worth
This value is composed of absolutely everything I own. In the case of my calculator, my assets fall into the following categories:
- Accounts
- Real Estate
- Bonds
- Stocks
- Cryptocurrencies
- Valuable items
You can see that I have, for example, consistently invested in stocks, but also the fluctuations of my cash over the months.
I can also get a better idea of how my assets make up my wealth. This is very interesting for planning potential investments. By reading this chart, I know for example that I will continue to invest in the equity category in 2022 to reach at least 10% of my wealth. The cryptocurrency area is too small to show properly, but you can see the tiny orange slice at the top. In the GoogleSheet, you could move your mouse over it and notice that it only represents 0.7% of my wealth 🙂
Liquid net worth
Often, you like to know how much so-called “liquid assets or wealth” you have. If you don’t know what that is, I refer you to this post 🙂
This chart allows me to see how “fast” my liquid assets are growing. I notice that my DCA strategy of investing in the stock market is paying off, because I have a constant evolution of this category. I also notice that the proportion in “account” is still too important compared to the proportion in “stock“.
Portfolio evolution follow-up
When I started investing in the stock market, I bought only one ETF so it was quite easy to follow the evolution of all this and especially the composition of my stock portfolio. However, with time, I diversified my portfolio a little by buying some discounted stocks and the list quickly became quite large. I can therefore have an overview of the distribution of my investments in the stock market, and this over the months.
Thanks to this, I can from month to month, make sure that my investment strategy is respected for example. As the example above shows, you can see that in December, I have 43.7% of my portfolio invested in the VT ETF. Thanks to this tool, you can also do the same tracking of your possible investments in cryptocurrencies for example.
Conclusions
I hope this brief overview of the tool has motivated you enough to start tracking! Personally, I love doing this because it really allows me to keep track of my personal finances and also to make sure I’m following my investment strategies that I’ve defined.
In addition to these beautiful graphs, it allows me to know the evolution of my net worth, from month to month, or compared to the previous year in terms of percentage. In my case, in 2021, my overall net worth increased by 26.91%! How do you keep track of your wealth?
