The chequing account lives in one app. The credit card lives in another. The TFSA sits with one broker, the RRSP with another, and there is probably an old savings account nobody has opened since 2021. Every screen shows a slice. None of them shows the whole.
Net worth is the number that shows the whole. It is what you own minus what you owe, counted on one day, in one currency. Track that single figure over time and you stop guessing whether you are moving forward. This guide is how to build it and keep it, if you bank and invest in Canada.
What net worth is
Net worth is a subtraction. On one side you list assets, the things that hold value: cash, investments, registered accounts, a home, a car, anything you could reasonably sell or spend. On the other side you list liabilities, the money you owe: a mortgage, credit card balances, a line of credit, student loans, a car loan. Subtract the second total from the first and the result is your net worth.
It can be negative. A recent graduate with student debt and no savings has a negative net worth, and that is normal. The sign matters less than the direction the number moves.
Why one number beats chasing balances
Any single balance can mislead you. A strong month in your brokerage can hide a credit card balance creeping up. A scary market dip can feel like disaster until you notice your mortgage shrank and your savings grew in the same stretch. Net worth nets all of that out. It answers one question that no individual balance can: across everything I own and everything I owe, am I better off than last month, or worse.
Wealth is built slowly and mostly out of sight, so a figure you check once a month is exactly the right resolution. The number moves gently, and that slowness is what makes the trend readable.
Step 1: write down every account, on both sides
Start with a complete list. Missing accounts are the most common reason a net worth number drifts from reality, so err toward including things.
Assets to include:
- Chequing and savings
- TFSA, RRSP, FHSA, RESP, and any other registered accounts, including a LIRA you can no longer contribute to
- Taxable investment accounts at Wealthsimple, Questrade, Interactive Brokers, or a bank brokerage
- A workplace pension or group RRSP, if you can see a current value
- Crypto held on an exchange or in a wallet
- Your home, at a realistic resale price, not the number you are hoping for
- Vehicles, again at resale value
- Cash value of whole life insurance, if you hold any
Liabilities to include:
- Your mortgage balance
- Credit card balances
- Lines of credit, including a HELOC
- Student loans
- Car loans and any buy now, pay later balances
If several of those investment accounts sit at different brokers, the companion guide on tracking multiple brokerage accounts covers how to bring them into one place.
Step 2: settle on one base currency
Plenty of Canadians hold US listed stocks or keep a US dollar account. If you drop a US balance straight into a Canadian total, the number is wrong by whatever the exchange rate happens to be that day. Pick one base currency, almost always the Canadian dollar if you live and spend here, and convert every foreign balance into it before you add anything up. Convert at the current rate on the day you take the snapshot, not the rate from the day you bought.
This is the fussiest part, and the easiest to miss, because a mixed currency total still looks like a plausible number. It just is not the right one.
Step 3: choose manual or connected
There are two ways to do this, and both work.
Manual means a spreadsheet. One row per account, one column per month. It is free, fully private, and entirely in your control. The cost is discipline. You have to log in to each institution and copy the numbers yourself, and most people stop after a few months.
Connected means an app that links to your banks and brokerages and reads the balances for you. The numbers stay current with far less effort. The cost is trust, because you are letting a service see your accounts. Before you connect anything, read how the service handles your data and whether it uses official bank connections or older screen scraping. Our page on security explains how Mozaic approaches this.
The right choice is the one you will still be doing in a year.
Step 4: update on a schedule, not on impulse
Pick a day, once a month, and take the snapshot then. The first of the month works. So does payday. Checking daily does the opposite of what you want: markets wobble, your number wobbles with them, and you start reacting to noise that will be gone by Thursday. A monthly cadence turns twelve data points a year into a trend you can read.
The traps that make the number lie
Even a careful tracker goes wrong in predictable ways. Watch for these five.
- Double counting a transfer. Move $2,000 from chequing to a brokerage and, for a day or two, it can show up in both. Count each dollar once.
- Counting a home without its mortgage. A $700,000 house with a $500,000 mortgage adds $200,000 of equity to your net worth, not $700,000. The mortgage belongs on the liability side.
- Stale connections. A linked account that stopped updating will hold last month's figure. When something looks off, glance at the connection dates first.
- Mixing currencies. Covered above, and worth repeating because it leaves no visible trace. A US balance left in US dollars inflates a Canadian total.
- Forgetting the small stuff. The old savings account, the forgotten RESP, the last car loan payment. Small accounts do not move the total much, but leaving them out means each month you are measuring a slightly different set of accounts, and the trend stops being comparable.
What a good setup looks like
One view with every account on it. A single base currency. A monthly snapshot. A line that shows the last year or two. That is the entire job. Forecasts, ratios, and scoring systems are optional; the number, the date, and the direction are enough.
If you keep it in a spreadsheet, that is a completely respectable answer, and you should not let anyone talk you out of it. If the manual upkeep is the thing that keeps defeating you, an app that gathers the accounts for you removes the exact step people abandon. That is the gap the Mozaic net-worth tracker is built to fill. It pulls your Canadian and US accounts into one net worth view, converts them to your base currency, and lets you add a house or a car by hand for the pieces no bank can report. If you hold accounts in more than one currency, the multi-currency net-worth view does the daily FX conversion for you. It is the same instinct that sent people looking for something to replace Mint, pointed at the single number rather than the daily budget.
Whatever you use, the habit matters more than the tool. Pick a day, count what you own and what you owe, write it down, and come back next month. The number will start telling you the truth, and after a year the trend will tell you the rest. If you want Mozaic to keep that monthly snapshot current for you, the 14-day free trial needs no card.