If you’re in debt or living paycheck-to-paycheck, it’s easy to get discouraged about your financial situation and take the all-too-common Ignorance is Bliss approach to personal finance. Even if you’re making monthly payments to your 401k, that money tends to be out of sight, out of mind. Most people know they have a certain amount left on their car payment, what their monthly mortgage costs, and that they are contributing to a retirement account. What they don’t know, and what might surprise them, is how all of this fits together.

Easy solution: start tracking your net worth.

Start Tracking Your Net Worth

You can do this in a handful of ways. The easiest way is to link all of your accounts to one of several helpful tools such as Mint or Personal Capital. Checking account, savings, investments, liabilities—link ’em all. If you’re not comfortable with a third-party site, go ahead and do the leg work yourself via a little manual entry into an Excel doc. In either case, gather all of your financial information so that you have a clear picture of where you stand. Then simply update this information at a regular interval. I prefer to do this monthly, but quarterly or even annually are sufficient if you don’t get your jollies off of this sort of thing.

Tracking my net worth has been the single biggest motivating factor in actually giving a shit about my money. For that, I owe the Net Work Tracking torchbearer, J. Money, who tracked his own net worth for all the world to see for years up until he recently crossed the million-dollar threshold. Congrats J. Money!

I’m not brave (or proud) enough to post my net worth on the internet just yet. I’m keeping this finance thing impersonal, after all! But I do love some good personal finance porn. I lived vicariously through J. Money’s monthly updates before finally taking a more deliberate approach to tracking my own net worth.

How can you start tracking your net worth? Very easily. There are a couple popular options that will do this for you. I’m partial to Mint, which tracks net worth but is also a great resource to track spending and categorize purchases.

Specifically for net worth purposes, Personal Capital is cleaner. It includes some unique additional features and charts you can utilize, as long as you don’t mind somebody calling and emailing you to try to get you to upgrade to their financial advisor services every few months. You’ll see Personal Capital all over the personal finance blogosphere. Is that because it’s a great resource? Yes, that’s part of it. But it’s popularity in this space is mostly due to Personal Capital’s nice affiliate link that will pay bloggers for getting people to sign up for their service. But hey, no judgment here. In time, we’ll likely join in on this money making pursuit if the product is worthwhile. Truthfully, I haven’t been using Personal Capital long enough to tell you. In the meantime, I’d encourage starting with Mint.

While I’ve used both of these services, I’ve developed the cathartic monthly routine of plugging these numbers into my own Excel sheet. No surprise, I’ve done this with a spreadsheet I ripped off from no other than J. Money and Budgets Are Sexy). This routine provides me with a regularly scheduled appointment to think consciously about my money, even if only for five minutes at the end of each month.

Start Giving A Shit

Mint has tracked my net worth for me for almost a decade, but I recommend starting your own spreadsheet. In addition to the raw numbers, I jot down a few notes each month. I record what my contributions were to any retirement accounts, any major purchases or unexpected expenses, and how the market performed. It goes without saying that the more you have invested, the more directly your net worth will be tied to market gains/losses rather than your monthly earnings/expenditures. This can make for quite a ride during a downturn like the one we just experienced. Needless to say, this net worth tracking business was not so fun in March 2020.

But when the market rises, so will your spirits. It’s incredibly motivating to see the numbers jump when your net worth turns positive or reaches new milestones. But for me, net worth tracking was even more helpful when I had debts on the books. I used to curse myself every time I had to throw money at a debt. It felt like flushing cash down the toilet. But in my spreadsheet, I could see the effect it had on my overall financial situation. By making my debt part of the overall picture rather than a singular, annoying goal, I was motivated to accelerate those debt payments. I could see the direct correlation that paying my debts had in increasing my net worth.

All in all, there’s really no downside to tracking your net worth. It’s a very simple step to give yourself a total picture of what you own and what you owe, and to motivate you to owning more and owing less. As a regular exercise, it helps keep money top of mind throughout the year. Simply put, it helps you to start giving a shit.