How to Track Your Net Worth Without Linking Your Bank Accounts

Most net worth apps start the same way: pick your bank, type your online banking password, wait for the sync. Plenty of people stop right there. They don't want a third party holding a login to their accounts, or their bank isn't supported, or the sync breaks every few weeks and they give up.

You can skip all of that. A net worth figure needs two things: what you own and what you owe. Neither one requires a live connection to your bank.

What bank linking actually involves

When an app "connects" to your bank, it usually goes through an aggregator, a company that sits between the app and thousands of banks. Depending on the bank and country, the aggregator either uses an official API or logs in on your behalf with the credentials you gave it.

That works well when it works. The trade-offs are real, though:

• Another company now has access to your transaction history, and sometimes to your login.
• Connections expire and need to be re-authorised every few months.
• Smaller banks, foreign accounts, physical gold, property and private loans are rarely supported anyway, so you end up typing those in by hand regardless.

If half your wealth needs manual entry anyway, the sync is solving a smaller problem than it seems.

The manual-first method

This routine holds up over years.

1. List every account and asset once. Current accounts, savings, brokerage accounts, pension pots, crypto wallets, gold, your home, your car. Then the debts: mortgage, car loan, credit cards, student loan.
2. Pick one day a month. The first Sunday, payday, whatever you'll remember. Daily tracking mostly adds noise. (More on that in how often to track your net worth.)
3. Update balances from statements. Open each banking app, read the balance, type it in. For ten accounts this takes about ten minutes.
4. Let prices update what can be priced. Stocks, ETFs, gold and crypto don't need you. If you record the quantity (say 14 shares of an ETF or 50 g of gold), a tracker with live prices can value them every day.
5. Write down one sentence about the change. "Down 2% because markets fell" and "up 4% because I paid off the credit card" are very different months. The note is what makes the number useful later.

Statements instead of logins

The slowest part of manual tracking is brokerage accounts with many positions. Typing 30 lines of ETF holdings is nobody's idea of fun.

This is where statement import helps. Your broker already gives you a PDF listing every position. In NetWorthy you upload that file, we read the holdings table, and you check each row before anything is saved. There's no login involved, the file only has the positions on it, and you stay in control of what gets published. We read statements from Trade Republic, Revolut, Robinhood and Fidelity today, and try to detect the holdings table in statements from other brokers.

Isn't manual entry less accurate?

Less frequent, yes. Less accurate, usually not. Synced data has its own problems: duplicated accounts, transfers counted twice, investment accounts that report a stale value. With manual entry you look at every number, which is also how you notice the subscription you forgot about.

The goal is a trend you trust, month over month. Precision to the cent doesn't matter much when your stock portfolio moves by hundreds on an ordinary day.

A practical setup

• Use one tracker for the total, even if you keep budgets elsewhere.
• Record quantities for anything with a market price, and balances for everything else.
• Keep property at a conservative estimate and update it once a year. (See should you count your home in your net worth?)
• If you hold money in several currencies, pick one currency for the total. This guide explains why.

If you want a quick starting number before setting anything up, the free net worth calculator runs entirely in your browser.

Why NetWorthy doesn't ask for your bank login

We decided early not to build bank linking. NetWorthy never asks for your online banking password. You enter balances or upload a statement, live prices take care of stocks, gold and crypto, and your values are encrypted at rest. It's a little more hands-on than an auto-sync app, and that's on purpose: you see every number that goes into your net worth.