That sounds confusing but here’s an example of what I mean:

Current assets:

Checking account
Savings account
Emergency fund
Funded contribution to IRA year-to-date (YTD)
YTD increase in home equity due to mortgage pay-down

Current liabilities:

Credit cards
Student loans
Car loan
Yearly IRA contribution goal
Yearly goal on mortgage pay-down

Say your goal is to contribute $5000 to an IRA this year. The year would start with a $5000 liability and zero in the current asset funded IRA, and as you make a contribution, it would decrease your liability and increase your asset.

This would give you a much clearer picture of how well you’re doing in meeting your goals and improving your situation. (And, by the way, I am aware that calling this a Net Worth calculation would be highly misleading in accounting terms.)

The full-blown net worth is probably only worth doing once or twice a year, obviously omitting these “made-up” categories.

In this case, though, there’s really not much of a difference between the “doer” and the “critic” – we’re all just babbling on the internet. True, Trent has the burden, which the rest of us don’t, of coming up with stuff to write about in the first place. But he’s also the only one here getting paid, so that seems fair.

As Riki said the other day, I’m not here because Trent dispenses some kind of magical wisdom. (And if that’s why you’re here, maybe you’re the one who should move on, because there are so many better sources of wisdom out there.) I’m here because the comment threads often contain interesting exchanges of ideas, when people share their own experiences and advice that might be different from Trent’s.

If you (or if anyone) want to criticize my comments the same way as I criticize Trent’s posts, please do. If I’ve made a factual mistake, please correct it. If I’ve overstated an argument or overlooked something, point that out. If I’ve said something unintentionally offensive, let me know. But if you don’t have anything to add along any of those lines, what exactly are you hoping to accomplish by telling me to shut up?

“…the man who really counts in the world is the doer, not the mere critic-the man who actually does the work, even if roughly and imperfectly, not the man who only talks or writes about how it ought to be done.” (1891)

“Criticism is necessary and useful; it is often indispensable; but it can never take the place of action, or be even a poor substitute for it. The function of the mere critic is of very subordinate usefulness. It is the doer of deeds who actually counts in the battle for life, and not the man who looks on and says how the fight ought to be fought, without himself sharing the stress and the danger.” (1894)

Trent and Brittany, I appreciate the work you do.

This is a professional blog. Thousands of posts and milliuons of page views.

Criticism is both necessary and unfortunately required at times.

The little mistakes that keep being made get tiresome.

I have held off writing this forever, but your consistent negativity on just about every single post on this site is really annoying. If a suggestion doesn’t work for you, fine. Move on, and let those who get value from the post enjoy it.

To be fair, I certainly don’t track it closely, so it wasn’t a massive motivational tool for me. But if it works for others, cool.

But I think that if you have any money at all (even just a few hundred dollars) invested in stocks or other assets whose values fluctuate a lot, tracking your net worth too frequently can cause you to stress too much about short-term fluctuations in asset values, and can lead to bad investing decisions as a result.

And I’d think that for someone who’s really just getting started, it would be better to set up a system where it’s not possible to spend more than you earn, rather than relying on the motivating power of the despair you (might) feel when your net worth goes down. Figure out how much you can afford to spend each month on non-fixed expenses, and once you’ve spent that much, stop spending – making an exception only for true emergencies that threaten your health or safety.