The Mom Weekly Volume 112: September 30, 2025
You can read this, or any other previous Mom Weeklies, by going to the home page here. https://themomweekly.com/
Time to Update Your Net Worth (Mom’s Occasional Money Advice)
We are at the end of the quarter, so it is time to update your net worth!
Yes, this headline pops up every quarter, and that is not going to change.
Here’s why: I am trying to convince you to start this practice early, so you can feel more confident over time about how your money life looks. It really works!
Calculating net worth has been enormously helpful in making me feel more confident about our finances, just by knowing.
Before doing this regularly, I might have been concerned about our spending at different times—for instance, sometimes we would have a year when we had big tuition bills, or we had done a lot of house-related spending.
I would have an amorphous feeling like, “eek, we are spending too much..” or “things don’t feel stable, but I can’t imagine how to figure this out except for taking a million years to track every bit of our spending…”
Or, alternatively, I might think, “Everything’s great!” But not really know. Knowledge is power, as the kids like to say. And it’s true!
Even when headlines talk about how bad the stock market is doing, or how terrible the housing market is in our area—both things that occurred in the recent past—I can look at how our personal finances are doing, and not pay attention so much to what the headlines say.
Here is a version of my regular pitch:
This may take slightly longer this first time, if you have not done so. But I promise you, over time, you will be happy that you do this.
The only reason I hesitate is that, especially for younger people, it could be pretty likely you have a negative net worth, largely because of student loans. But that’s will be so temporary (over the long haul!) that you should not be discouraged by it.
When people begin to track their net worth, they call it “getting back to zero” when they have a zero net worth. That may not seem promising, but it’s a great accomplishment for those who have paid off a significant amount of debt, whether student loan debt, credit card debt, or other types of debt.
And it can be very encouraging to see an improvement in your net worth over time.
Here is a super-simple net worth calculator spreadsheet I put together.
There’s no formatting with cool colors and such, but it works and completes the calculations for you. Let me know what you think about it!
A few notes:
*Make your own spreadsheet or list. Unfortunately, Google Sheets does not allow password-protecting of items. I prefer to keep this information, and most of my spreadsheets, in a format I can password protect. Think Microsoft Excel, Apple’s Numbers, etc. You can even do this on paper if you want, and store it somewhere safe.
*There are two “sheets” in the shared spreadsheet — the first is a blank one, and the second is a sample with random numbers that I have included. I have added made-up numbers to the sample sheet, so you can see how the numbers change over time.
*Sometimes people do not include their vehicles or mortgages. I do, because you can see how much equity you have in the house or vehicle. But I mentally don’t include them with the same weight as other assets, since they are not liquid and it’s not likely one would sell them for living expenses, in retirement or not.
Interesting/Notable:
Looking to Make New Friends? Try Church. — Aletheia
I love this! This is written by an online friend I met years ago at a Catholic blogger conference. Like her, I have met people through noticing them at church. It’s really worth a quick conversation!
How to Include Kids Without Centering Them—Priya Parker
Also, what great ideas of what to do with older kids in a larger gathering. Priya Parker is the author of The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters.