Net worth is everything you own minus everything you owe: $620,000 of assets against $345,000 of liabilities is a net worth of $275,000 and a debt-to-assets ratio of 55.65%. And on this page the figures never leave the browser: no account, no email, no saving, no sending — the math runs on this page alone.
What counts as an asset
An asset here is something owned that has a current value: bank balances at what they hold today, investment and retirement accounts at their current balances, a home at its current market value — not its purchase price, which describes a transaction years past, not a holding today — and vehicles at resale value, what they could actually be sold for. The judgment calls are named honestly rather than hidden: illiquid items, collectibles, and things with sentimental value are the owner's call, because a balance sheet only works with values someone could defend. Anything owned that has no row of its own goes into Other assets — if two unlisted items belong there, add them together into that one field.
What counts as a liability
A liability is a balance owed: the remaining mortgage principal, the payoff balances on auto and student loans, total credit-card balances, and any other debt. The figure that belongs here is the payoff balance — what it would take to close the debt — not the monthly payment. Payments are a flow, a rate of money leaving; balances are a stock, an amount standing at a moment, and a balance sheet is built entirely of stocks. That distinction is also why a debt is never entered as a negative asset on this page: the two-sided layout is the method, and putting a mortgage in as a negative home value would bury the two totals this page exists to show separately.
Worked example — the pre-filled balance sheet
The calculator is pre-filled with exactly this case:
- Assets: $15,000.00 + $120,000.00 + $450,000.00 + $25,000.00 + $10,000.00 = $620,000.00 (home value is 72.6% of assets)
- Liabilities: $300,000.00 + $18,000.00 + $4,000.00 + $22,000.00 + $1,000.00 = $345,000.00 (the mortgage is 87.0% of liabilities)
- Net worth: $620,000.00 − $345,000.00 = $275,000.00
- Debt-to-assets ratio: $345,000 ÷ $620,000 × 100 = 55.65%
Every row also gets a breakdown share — its percentage of its own side's total — so the composition is visible alongside the sums, not just the difference between them.
The breakdown shares repay a second look, because two households with the same net worth can hold it very differently. A balance sheet dominated by one illiquid row — a home at 72.6% of assets, as in the example — is a different position from the same total held mostly in bank and investment accounts, even though the headline figure is identical. The shares do not judge either composition; they make the composition visible, which the single difference between two totals cannot do on its own. The same applies on the liabilities side, where an 87.0% mortgage share describes secured, asset-backed borrowing in a way the raw total does not distinguish from unsecured balances.
Reading the three outputs
Net worth is a snapshot: it describes one moment, and it moves as balances are paid, values change, and accounts grow or shrink. The debt-to-assets ratio states the same balance sheet as a proportion — what share of everything owned is claimed by everything owed. In the worked example that share is 55.65%. The ratio can exceed 100%: when the total owed is larger than the total owned, the honest figure says so — one of this page's checked cases, $30,500 owed against $8,500 owned, produces a ratio of 358.82% and a net worth of −$22,000.00, displayed signed, in the primary position, at the same prominence as any positive result. A negative result means the total owed is more than the total owned — the arithmetic on this page, stated plainly. When there are no assets at all, the ratio has nothing to divide by and shows a dash with a note, never an infinite percentage.
Why a snapshot is worth re-running
A single net-worth figure is a photograph; the same calculation run again later is a second photograph, and the difference between the two describes a direction in a way neither figure does alone. Balances that were estimates get replaced with current ones, debts that closed disappear from the liabilities side, and property values get refreshed. Re-running the same rows on the same definitions is what makes the two snapshots comparable — changing what counts between runs would manufacture movement that never happened. This page keeps the rows fixed for exactly that reason.
Privacy — how this page works
The privacy statement on this page is a property of how it is built, stated so it can be checked: the page is static, the arithmetic runs in your browser, there is no account and no email field, the figures are not stored anywhere — not on a server, and not in your browser's storage either — and closing the page discards everything you entered. That contrasts with tracker products around this kind of calculation, which commonly ask for an email signup and linked bank credentials before showing any figures, and with calculators that offer to save your inputs for later recall. A balance sheet is among the most personal documents a household has; this page's position is that computing one does not require handing it to anyone.