Your net worth is one number: everything you own minus everything you owe. It is the single cleanest measure of your financial progress. The problem in India is not the math, it is the gathering. Your money is scattered across a savings account, a couple of mutual funds, some stocks, an EPF balance, maybe a home loan, and there is no Plaid-style API that pulls it all together. So most people never actually calculate it.
Here is how to do it properly, and how to stop doing it by hand.
Step 1: add up your assets
Assets are anything that holds value. Pull the current balance for each of these:
- Bank accounts — savings, current, and any fixed deposits.
- Mutual funds — the current value, not what you invested.
- Stocks and demat holdings — current market value.
- EPF and PPF — your latest passbook balance.
- Cash, gold, and other assets — a fair current estimate.
- Property — a realistic resale value, not the price you paid.
Step 2: add up your liabilities
Liabilities are what you owe. Use the outstanding balance, not the original loan amount:
- Home loan
- Car loan
- Personal loans
- Credit card balances you are carrying
- Any money borrowed from family or friends
Step 3: subtract
Net worth = total assets − total liabilities. That is the whole formula. If the number is negative, that is normal early in a career with an education or home loan; the job is to make the trend point up over time.
The shortcut for investments: your CAS statement
The most tedious part is investments, because they are spread across fund houses and brokers. There is a shortcut almost nobody uses: the Consolidated Account Statement (CAS). CAMS and KFintech email a CAS covering your mutual funds; CDSL and NSDL email one covering your demat (stocks, ETFs, bonds). One or two statements cover most people’s entire market portfolio, with current values already calculated. You can request a CAS from their portals, and it lands in your inbox.
Skip the spreadsheet
Foliom reads your CAS statement and your bank, salary and SIP emails and builds your net worth automatically — then keeps it current. See it on sample data, no signup.
See your net worth, automatedThe real problem: it goes stale the next day
Even if you build the spreadsheet, it is accurate for about a day. Markets move, a SIP debits, salary lands, a card bill goes out. Within a week your number is wrong, and rebuilding it by hand every week is something nobody actually does.
This is exactly the gap Foliom closes. Instead of you gathering data, it reads the emails you already get — bank alerts, CAS statements, salary credits, SIP confirmations — and assembles your net worth for you, revaluing holdings as new statements arrive. The number stays current without you touching a spreadsheet. It is read-only, and your email body is never stored.
The habit that matters
Calculate it once to get your baseline. Then check the trend monthly. The exact figure matters less than the direction: is it climbing, and how fast? That single trend tells you more than any individual budgeting tweak.