How to track your net worth across every account

What is your net worth right now, to the nearest thousand? Go on, have a guess. Most people, asked that, do a little squint and start adding things up from memory. The broker app says one number. The pension portal said something else last time they logged in, which was back in March. The crypto is “roughly” whatever it was when it last felt exciting, and there is some cash in a current account plus a bit more in a savings pot they keep forgetting about. So they add it all up, round generously, and announce a figure with the confidence of a man who has not actually checked.

That figure is a guess stitched together from half a dozen stale browser tabs. And you are making real money decisions on it.

Nobody really admits this about money. To track your net worth across every account you first have to wrangle a book that lives in a dozen different places, and each place has its own login, its own currency, its own idea of what “today’s value” even means. Hardly anyone does that wrangling. So hardly anyone quotes a number they have actually reconciled. Let us fix that, because it is far more doable than it looks.

Why your net worth is scattered in the first place

You did not set out to spread your money across the planet. It just happened, one sensible decision at a time. You opened a taxable brokerage account. Then a pension or an ISA, because tax wrappers are free money and you are not a fool. Then you bought a little crypto and parked the serious chunk in a cold wallet, with the rest still sitting on an exchange. Cash got spread across a couple of banks. Maybe you have a second broker because the first one did not list the thing you wanted.

Every one of those was the right call. The side effect is that your book is now scattered across stocks, funds, crypto, options and cash, sitting in taxable accounts, a pension or ISA, an exchange and a wallet. No single screen anywhere shows you the whole thing. The broker shows you the broker, the pension portal shows you the pension, and not one of them shows you the actual you.

So you do the human thing and stitch it together in your head, or in a spreadsheet you last touched in spring. Either way you get a number that is wrong in ways you cannot see.

The stale-tabs problem, and why it bites

An untidy guess would be one thing. A dangerous one is worse, and what makes it dangerous is that the errors never announce themselves.

Maybe the pension figure is three months old and the market has moved a long way since. Maybe you counted the exchange balance but forgot the cold wallet entirely. Maybe half your accounts report in pounds and the others in dollars, and you mentally converted at a rate you half-remember from a holiday. Maybe you sold something in one account and the proceeds are now cash you have not counted as cash. Any one of those errors is small. Stack them together and they can push your “net worth” out by enough to change what you do next. And you will never spot it, because nothing on any of those screens is actually lying. Every screen is telling the truth about its own little corner. The lie sneaks in when you add them up.

A number you assembled like that is a vibe with a pound sign stuck on the front of it. And you cannot reconcile a vibe.

Track net worth across all accounts by writing it down once

The fix is gloriously low-tech, and the finance industry would rather you reached for something with an API. You write it down. Once.

You enter what you own, holding by holding, in one book. The symbol, how many you hold, what you paid, and which account it lives in. The lot on the taxable broker, the fund in the ISA, the coins on the exchange, the coins in the cold wallet, the cash in each bank. It is one sitting with a cup of tea, because you own a few dozen positions, not hundreds. We have written before about why doing this by hand is a feature and not a chore, so I will not relitigate it here. The short version is that a book you typed is a book you can check against reality.

From that single pile of facts, Strata does the wrangling you would otherwise do badly in your head. It derives a live valuation from public market data, so the pension is no longer stuck back in March. It pulls everything into one currency while remembering the original, so the dollars and the pounds stop fighting in the corner. It tracks FIFO tax lots and your realised and unrealised profit and loss, so a sale turns into cash and not into a mysterious hole. Every asset class, across every account, collapses into one figure. That figure is a derivation you can stand behind. You did not cross your fingers and hope for it.

Reconciliation is what makes the number trustworthy

A single figure is only worth having if it is correct, and this is the step the credential-linking aggregators quietly skip over. You reconcile. You check the book against the statements until they agree.

Because you typed the ledger, you can hold it up against the real thing. Open your broker statement and your Strata book side by side and confirm that the share counts match, the cash matches, the cost basis matches. Then do the same for the exchange, the wallet, the pension. When every account ties out, the total ties out too, and now you have a net-worth number you have actually proven. The man squinting at his memory never gets to say that.

This is the whole reason the entry is manual. An aggregator that logs in for you can double a position or freeze it at last week’s value, and you cannot tell whether the discrepancy is your mistake or the pipeline’s, because you did not write either number to begin with. A book you cannot reconcile is a book you cannot trust. Type it and check it yourself and you can audit the thing line by line, which is exactly the standard your own money deserves. If your accounts are spread across several brokers in particular, the same logic runs even harder, and we go deeper on it in tracking a portfolio across multiple brokerage accounts.

So, is the squint-and-guess era over?

It can be, if you want it to be. The honest trade-off goes like this. Linking your accounts asks for nothing now and hands you a number you can never quite verify. Typing your book costs you one cup of tea up front, and after that you get a figure you can prove every time you look at it, across every account you hold, all in one currency and checked against the statements.

If you would genuinely rather have the magic feed that updates while you ignore it, and a roughly-right number is fine for you, then go in peace. But if you have ever announced your net worth out loud and then privately wondered whether it was true, a cleverer guess is not going to cure that. A book you keep yourself will. You can build your portfolio and get to one reconciled figure, instead of six stale tabs and a hopeful round number.