How to track your net worth in Excel, step by step

A spreadsheet is still the best way to start tracking your wealth. It costs nothing, it needs access to none of your accounts, and it forces you to do something nobody does spontaneously: look at all your figures in one place, on a fixed date.

The catch is keeping the file alive past the third month. Most net worth trackers die the same way: too many columns on day one, formulas that break at the first copy-paste, a history that quietly rewrites itself. This tutorial walks through a method that avoids those traps, one step at a time. It is built around our free net worth spreadsheet template, which you can download and follow along with, or simply recreate in your own file.

The template uses French account types (Livret A, PEA, assurance-vie, PER), for anyone who is tax resident in France. The method itself works wherever you live.

What you are going to build

A good tracker fits into three tabs, plus a page of instructions:

Holdings: one row per account, investment, property or loan. It is the only tab you fill in.
Summary: your net worth, the breakdown of your assets, what each partner owns and a few indicators. Everything there is calculated for you.
Monthly tracking: one row a month and the curve of your net worth.

The template adds a "Read me" tab and some made-up examples showing how to fill it in: delete them before you start. It contains no macros and also opens in Google Sheets (upload it to Google Drive, then "Open with › Google Sheets").

Step 1: list what you own and what you owe

Open the "Holdings" tab and create one row for each item, assets and debts in the same table. Four pieces of information matter on each row:

Name: "Livret A", "PEA at my broker", "Lyon flat"… whatever lets you find the statement again;
Type: picked from a list, it decides the row's group and its side (asset or debt);
Owner: me, partner or joint;
Value: today's amount, in euros.

The template offers 23 types sorted into seven groups: cash and savings (current account, Livret A, LDDS, LEP, PEL), stock market (PEA, securities account, shares), life insurance, retirement savings (PER), property, SCPI and other assets (crypto, physical gold, private equity, car, jewellery and collectibles). Mortgages, car loans and consumer loans count as debts. A hundred rows are ready, which leaves plenty of room.

Leave out nothing that has a value or is owed: the current account you never touch, the PEL opened fifteen years ago, the car loan. But do not go into more detail than you need: one row per account is enough, not one row per fund.

Step 2: put a value on each row

For bank and savings accounts, the balance on the statement is the figure. For a PEA, a securities account or a life insurance policy, take the surrender or market value shown by the provider, not the total you have paid in.

For a loan, the rule is simple and often misapplied: enter the outstanding capital, not the amount you borrowed nor the sum of the remaining repayments. You will find it on the amortisation schedule or in your online banking.

Property is the trickiest row. Use a realistic estimate of what the home would sell for today, and stick to it: the purchase price goes stale quickly, and a wishful price inflates your net worth at a stroke. Write down in the "Note" column where the figure comes from.

Finally, fill in the "Last checked" column. It looks optional; it is what will tell you, six months from now, which values are out of date. In the template, the date turns orange after 45 days.

Step 3: work out your net worth

Net worth is what you own minus what you owe. In a spreadsheet, the most robust way to calculate it is not to add cells up one by one, but to let a "Side" column say whether each row is an asset or a debt, then add up by condition:

=SUMIFS(D6:D105,I6:I105,"Asset")-SUMIFS(D6:D105,I6:I105,"Debt")

Here column D holds the values and column I the side, on rows 6 to 105. The side itself is derived from the type with a VLOOKUP into a small hidden table that maps each type to its group and side. The result: you add a row, pick a type, and it files itself on the right side. No formula to rewrite.

The same principle gives you the breakdown (SUMIFS on the group) and what each person owns, with two criteria:

=SUMIFS(D6:D105,C6:C105,"Joint",I6:I105,"Asset")-SUMIFS(D6:D105,C6:C105,"Joint",I6:I105,"Debt")

With the template's made-up examples, that gives €449,500 of assets (a joint account, a Livret A, a PEA, a life insurance policy, a flat), €185,000 of mortgage still owed, and so €264,500 of net worth. If you want to check your own figure once, the net worth calculator does the same sum online. For the finer points of the method, see how to calculate your net worth.

Step 4: keep a monthly history

A single net worth figure does not say much. Its trajectory does. The "Monthly tracking" tab takes one row a month: the date, total assets, total debts. Net worth, the change over the month and the change since the start are calculated for you, and the curve follows.

There is one trap, just one, but it ruins histories: copy the two totals as values, with Paste special › Values. Paste the formula instead and August's row will show September's figures in September, and the whole history will move with them.

In the template, the three example months show the idea: €253,700 in August, €259,350 in September, €264,500 in October. Assets rise, the debt falls with every repayment, and net worth grows by €10,800 in two months without any single row doing anything dramatic.

Step 5: read the breakdown and the indicators

The "Summary" tab shows a doughnut chart of your assets by group, and three indicators:

Debt ratio: debts divided by assets. In the example, €185,000 against €449,500, or about 41%.
Available savings: the share of cash and savings accounts in your assets.
Largest holding: the weight of your biggest asset, a measure of concentration. For many households it is the main residence, and that is normal.

These are reading aids, not thresholds to reach: they depend on your age, your plans and your main residence. What makes them useful is whether they move from one month to the next. For more on what the figure covers, our article on the definition of net worth sets out what goes in and what stays out.

The ten-minute monthly routine

Once the file is built, upkeep is quick, as long as it is regular:

Pick a fixed date, for example the first weekend of the month.
Open your statements and update the "Value" column. In the template, only the gold cells need filling in.
Update the date on the rows you have checked.
In "Monthly tracking", add a row and copy the two totals as values.
Glance at the summary: an indicator that moved for no reason often points to a typo.

Your property does not need revaluing every month; once a year is enough, barring a major event. The outstanding capital on a loan, on the other hand, falls with every repayment.

The mistakes that skew the tracker

Counting property gross, without the mortgage. This is the most common mistake and the most costly. A €350,000 flat bought with a loan does not add €350,000 to your net worth: in the template's example, €185,000 is still to be repaid. Always put the loan on its own row, at its outstanding capital.

Forgetting the owner in a couple. Without an owner column, there is no way of knowing what each partner holds, nor of seeing clearly when a gift, a separation or an estate comes up. And if each partner keeps their own file, the joint account and the shared flat end up counted twice. One file for the household, with "me", "partner" and "joint"; our article on managing wealth as a couple goes further.

Letting values go stale. A life insurance policy last updated eight months ago skews the total with nothing to flag it. That is what the update date is for: an orange row is a row to check.

Pasting formulas into the history. See step 4: a history made of formulas is not a history.

Keeping the examples. The template's made-up rows are there to show how to fill it in; left in place, they add themselves to your figures.

When a spreadsheet is no longer enough

A spreadsheet does some things very well: complete freedom of structure, it is free, no data held by a third party, and the habit of looking at your figures every month. It is enough as long as your wealth fits in twenty or so rows that you update yourself.

It becomes a chore when you have to guess the value of a property, retype share prices, keep the tax rules of each account up to date yourself, track the rent and charges of a rental property, or share the file with a partner without overwriting each other's work. We have gone through these limits in why spreadsheets are not enough.

When that day comes, nothing is lost. The template imports into Patrice as it is, for free: Settings › Import & export › Import. Patrice recognises the Name, Type, Owner and Value columns, identifies your loans as debts, and shows you each row before creating it; the file is read in your browser. The summary and tracking tabs are ignored. Patrice then takes over what a spreadsheet does badly: your property's value estimated from actual sales, prices updated on their own, French taxation, rental management and sharing with a partner.

In short

Tracking your net worth in Excel comes down to five habits: one row per asset and per debt, dated values, a net worth worked out with SUMIFS, a history copied as values every month, and a look at the breakdown. The rest is regularity.

To get started without building the file yourself, download the free net worth spreadsheet template: no sign-up, no macros, and ready to import into Patrice the day you need it.