What Counts in Net Worth? House, 401(k), RSUs and Debt

Does net worth include house value? Yes, at what the house is worth today, with the mortgage subtracted as a debt. The same logic answers most of the other questions: a 401(k) counts, a car counts at resale value, and unvested RSUs mostly do not.

This guide goes through each item people argue about, then shows how Open Net Worth, an open-source personal wealth agent you host yourself, records it. It also covers why the number in an app can differ from the one you worked out by hand.

Short answer: Net worth is what you own minus what you owe, today. Count your cash, investments, retirement accounts, home, car and valuables at realistic values, and subtract every loan and card balance in full. Leave out salary and future earnings, and keep unvested RSUs out until they vest.

Note: The household and every amount in this post are invented. Open Net Worth is software, not a financial advisor. This post shows how the app works. It is not financial, investment, tax or legal advice.

The rule: what you own minus what you owe

Banks and advisers define it the same way. Empower calls net worth the total value of your assets minus your total liabilities, and TD puts it as what would be left if you sold everything today and paid off your debts. MetLife gives the same formula with a home and a car on the asset side and a mortgage and a card balance on the other.

Two details from Empower’s guide settle many arguments. Use current balances and realistic resale values, and count the full debt you owe. Do not include your salary or future earnings.

What counts, item by item

The values in the table follow Empower’s guide. Cash-value life insurance counts at what the policy would pay if you cashed it in, not at the sum assured. Term, health and car insurance have no cash value, so there is nothing to count.

Your home: count the value and the mortgage

Empower says to include the full estimated value of real estate or vehicles even while you are still making payments, and to list the mortgage as a liability at its current principal. The two together are your equity. In the example below, a $450,000 home with a $310,000 mortgage adds $140,000.

Some people prefer a number that ignores the house, because you cannot spend it. That is a fair way to look at things. Leave out the home and its mortgage together, because dropping only the house makes you look $310,000 poorer than you are.

In Open Net Worth the home is an asset, not an account:

1. Open Assets, click Add asset and pick Property.
2. Enter what it is worth today. Your best estimate is fine.
3. Keep All mine, or pick Shared and enter your share. Net worth counts only your share of the value.
4. Under Any loan against it?, pick the mortgage account or click + Add a loan.

The mortgage stays a Loan account, so its payments live in your ledger. Linking it makes the asset page show your equity and loan-to-value, while the Loan account’s balance is what subtracts from net worth. Do not also add the house as an account, or it counts twice.

One thing to know: asset values never change on their own. When you get a new valuation or an offer, open the asset and click Update value. A house you valued two years ago is the most common reason a total looks off.

Retirement accounts: counted, not spendable

A 401(k), IRA or pension account is yours, so it counts. Empower tells you to use the current vested balance, and MetLife’s example includes retirement accounts in the assets. The catch is that you cannot spend it today, which matters for questions like “can I afford this?” more than for net worth itself.

Open Net Worth has a Retirement account type for pensions, 401(k), IRA, CPF and SRS accounts. The Dashboard’s Net worth headline includes them. The Reachability widget, which you add when you customize the Dashboard, sorts everything you own into Liquid now, Delayed and Illiquid. Retirement funds, property and fixed deposits before maturity sit under Illiquid, so the headline stays whole while the split shows what you could reach.

If you want the number without them, ask Lucius, the agent in the app. He can read your net worth outside retirement accounts from the same calculation as the headline.

Unvested RSUs: leave them out until they vest

An RSU is a promise of shares. Fidelity’s help page says no company stock is issued at the grant, and that if you leave before the vest date you typically forfeit the units. An adviser’s guide to planning with unvested RSUs concludes they fit better on a cash flow projection than on a net worth statement, since you can neither sell nor borrow against them yet.

So counting them overstates what you have. In the example, $40,000 of unvested units would lift a $344,100 net worth by about 12%, with nothing you could spend.

Open Net Worth leaves unvested equity out of net worth and shows it separately as Unvested, on the holding’s Position tab and under Investments → Equity Compensation. Add the grant once, with its vesting schedule, and each time a tranche vests you click Mark vested. The shares then become an ordinary holding in the account you chose, valued at the market price like the rest of your investments. No cash transaction is booked, because you were paid in shares.

Two edge cases from the docs. If your plan delivers shares later, the vested shares count in net worth but are marked as not yet sellable until you record the release. And if you cancel a grant, for example when you leave a job, its unvested units drop to zero while shares that already vested stay yours. Equity compensation is still a beta area, so check the figures against your broker statement.

Debts: the balance, not the payment

Everything you owe counts at its full balance: mortgage, car loan, student loan, personal loan and every credit card. This is the easiest place to get a wrong total, because a debt entered the wrong way gets added instead of subtracted.

In Open Net Worth the account type decides that. Credit covers cards, buy-now-pay-later and lines of credit. Loan covers mortgages, car, student, personal and margin loans. A debt entered as a Cash account is added, and the type cannot be changed afterwards, so create a new account of the right type and move the transactions into it.

Margin works differently. If the cash inside a brokerage account is negative because you trade on margin, that is a loan secured by your holdings. It reduces what your investments are worth.

Keep one other number straight. Cash on hand is only your Cash-type accounts. It leaves out fixed deposits, settlement cash and retirement, and it does not subtract credit card balances, so it is always much smaller than net worth and not the same thing.

The easy-to-forget items

• Vehicles. Count resale value, not what you paid. Add it as an asset with its car loan linked.
• Valuables. Watches, art, collectibles and precious metals go on the Assets screen. Gold ETFs and stocks belong in an investment account instead.
• Money owed to you. A loan you made to a friend or family member is a Receivable account and counts toward net worth. It also shows as Illiquid in the Reachability split.
• Foreign currency. Each account keeps its own currency and the app converts to your base currency when adding up, so a USD brokerage and a EUR mortgage add up correctly. Balances and holdings use the current rate.
• Fixed deposits and CDs. They count, as a separate account type, but they stay out of cash on hand.

An example, start to finish

Here is an invented household: a couple with a house, a 401(k) and an RSU grant.

Assets that count add up to $684,000: $18,000 cash, $62,000 brokerage, $140,000 in the 401(k), $450,000 for the home and $14,000 for the car. Debts come to $339,900: $310,000 mortgage, $22,000 student loan, $6,000 car loan and a $1,900 card balance. Net worth is $344,100.

The same household without the 401(k) is $204,100, which is the figure to use if you want to know what sits outside retirement. And the $40,000 of unvested RSUs shows up beside the total, not in it.

Record it, then keep it current

1. Install Open Net Worth on a desktop, an always-on machine or in Docker.
2. Add your accounts by type: Cash, Fixed deposit, Investment, Retirement, Receivable, Credit and Loan. See the account types.
3. Add the home, car and valuables on the Assets screen, with loans linked.
4. Add any RSU or ESOW grant under Investments → Equity Compensation.
5. Compare the Dashboard headline with your own sum. If they differ, work through My net worth looks wrong.

Balances stay current in a few ways. Investment prices refresh by themselves, and asset values you update by hand. For bank balances, SimpleFIN and Plaid cover US and Canadian banks, both in beta, and Enable Banking covers the EU and UK. Without a connector, a budget app without bank sync works from your bank’s alert emails, and you can import bank statements at month end.

A single account that is off by a few cents is a different problem from a wrong total, and the balance mismatch guide walks through finding it. The personal finance workflow puts a short weekly review and a monthly close around the number so it does not go stale.

You can click through all of it, with fictional data, in the live demo. The FIRE outlook projects from the same net worth, with unvested equity left out. If you are comparing apps, check what each one counts, as in our comparison of open-source net worth trackers. For what Lucius does with the book once it is complete, see AI agent for personal finance.