Tracking Your Personal Net Worth
May 12, 2010 by Silicon Valley Blogger
Glad to be able to finally say that we hit the 4,000,000 unique visitor milestone just yesterday. Hopefully we’ll be able to continue the trend, so here’s to our next 4,000,000 encounters! In the time I’ve spent blogging about personal finance, the space has really undergone changes, and while bloggers may have evolved from being mere bloggers to becoming budding online entrepreneurs, what has not changed is how many of us remain interested in airing our laundry when it comes to money.
Tracking Your Personal Net Worth
This brought to mind an interesting article in the NY Times about this particular subject — the obsession that many people seem to have about their net worth. The article focuses on people who enjoy managing their money online and giving the world a peek at their net worth. It also has nice mentions and coverage of popular money tracking sites like Mint.com, Wesabe and NetWorthIQ.com, with its premise being that as we’ve become more comfortable with the Internet, we’ve also started to move more of our lives online, going as far as divulging many aspects of our private lives that we hold dear — in particular, our personal finances. Now I suppose that without this particular obsession, there wouldn’t be much reason for PF bloggers to exist and there wouldn’t be much fodder for us to capitalize on.
Here’s one person’s approach to monitoring his net worth. Check out Eric Mill’s site, called Oh No My Money which was featured in the NY Times net worth article.
A look at Eric Mill’s net worth chart:
Fine, it’s a nice article, but I was surprised it didn’t explore personal finance blogging a little more deeply, because let’s face it — if you want to feature a community who’s willing to share their financial information with you, their net worth, their debt journey and their innermost thoughts on money, you won’t find a more interesting group than the PF blogging set.
Why Personal Finance Bloggers Are Anonymous
But I do have a confession to make. I was a lot more candid about my personal finances in the past, but as this blog has grown over time, and more and more people I know have actually discovered the true identity behind The Digerati Life, I’ve been less comfortable about sharing this kind of information. You can now understand why I’ve opted to start out as anonymous. Over time, the anonymity is not going to be entirely possible to maintain as bloggers get to meet each other in person and start to “put a face to a name”. With those tradeoffs, I remain slightly chagrined that I now have to watch what I write over here, just a wee bit more carefully. Regardless of how I feel about the changes I’ve had to make in editorial direction, there remains that one constant: my desire to fan discussions about money. In doing so, I feel that I’ve greatly increased my knowledge and awareness about money management, one of the goals I set when I first started this site.
I thought I’d dig into my archives for a sampling of the stuff I’ve written in the past, on the subject of net worth:
I like how the NY Times article sums up this pastime,
Most of the hand-wringing we do around money essentially comes down to two basic questions: How am I doing? And, Am I going to be O.K.? Net worth is a pretty good answer to the first question and, over time, it offers hints as to how things might ultimately turn out. It’s an easy number to calculate and satisfies the desire for a single numerical grade.
But does our almost irresistible urge to rank ourselves against others based on any available data serve as a source of inspiration? Or does it lead to endless striving in search of some ever-elusive achievement?
which, in essence, is what prompts many a PF blogger to start writing.
So how obsessed are you with your net worth?
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