Tracking Net Worth

When I first graduated college, I was trying to keep an eye on and keep building my savings funds (emergency, 401K and Roth IRA), but my bigger focus was paying down my debt, and that definitely showed in the financial decisions I made.

Now that I’m about six months into life in the real world, I was getting discouraged.  I found that I’ve increased my savings accounts by more than $3,500 and that I’ve decreased my debt from nearly $30,000 down to about $25,000.  This seemed awesome until I realized that if I’d put that $3,500 into my debt instead of savings, I’d be down to $21,500 – pretty aggressive pay down if you ask me!

While it’s really tempting to say screw it and stop contributing to my savings accounts, I also know that I can’t be solely focused on just one financial goal.  To really look at my financial growth as a whole, I started tracking my net worth.

As it turns out, I get even more excited for this number at the end of the month!  Since I’m a huge nerd and I like to see comparisons of data, here’s a table that shows my change in debt and my change in net worth every month.

	Change in Debt	Change in Net Worth
July 2013	$169.66	$169.66
August 2013	$470.38	$770.58
September 2013	$473.15	$1,096.17
October 2013	$1,144.65	$2,092.39
November 2013	$2,628.56	$3,399.86
December 2013	$291.70	$1,302.68

You can see how exciting it was for me to be paying down my debt, but once I started factoring in how much I was growing my savings, I was ecstatic!

Do you track your debt progress so you can look back?  What about your net worth?