Net worth is the single most important number for tracking long-term financial health. It answers “If I cashed out everything today and paid off everything I owe, how much would I have left?”
The math
Net worth = Assets − Debts, where:
- Assets — checking, savings, investment account balances. Any manual account you've added with a positive balance.
- Debts — credit card balances, loan balances, mortgages. Any manual account you've added with a debt balance.
When it updates
- Connected accounts — balances refresh automatically when your bank tells Plaid they've changed (usually within a few hours of any swipe clearing).
- Manual accounts — update the balance yourself from the Accounts page whenever the number changes.
- The dashboard hero number is the latest known balances, summed. The chart underneath uses a monthly snapshot taken at the start of each month so you can see trend over time.
Month-over-month delta
The little ▲ or ▼ next to net worth compares the current value to the most recent prior month's snapshot. If you only just connected accounts, the delta won't appear until you have at least one snapshot to compare against — that's normal.
What's deliberately excluded
We don't auto-include estimated home value, vehicle value, or other illiquid assets. If you want to track those, add a manual account with the value you choose to assign — and update it on a cadence that matches reality (annually for a house, when sold for a car).