Track Your Net Worth Without Linking Your Bank
You don't need to link anything. Manual entry takes about ten minutes a month.
Most personal finance apps lead with bank syncing as the main feature. It feels convenient. Your balances update automatically, no effort required.
But a lot of people aren't comfortable handing over their banking credentials to a third-party app (for good reason). The good news is that giving this up doesn't mean you have to give up on tracking your net worth effectively.
Why automatic syncing isn't as essential as it sounds
Net worth isn't something you need to check daily. It moves slowly. The whole point is to track the trend over months and years, not to watch it tick up and down with every transaction.
That means a once-a-month manual snapshot is genuinely enough. You log in to each account, note the balance, and you're done. Most people can do this in under ten minutes.
What you actually need to track
Your net worth is just assets minus liabilities. That means:
Assets
- Transaction and savings accounts (your banking app)
- Retirement or investment accounts (your fund's app or portal)
- Shares or ETFs (your brokerage platform)
- Property (your best current estimate)
- Any other money owed to you
Liabilities
- Mortgage balance (your lender's app or statement)
- Student loan balances
- Car loan or personal loan balances
- Credit card balances
- Buy now, pay later balances
You don't need exact figures to the cent. A close number on the same day each month is enough to obtain value.
The case for doing it manually
Manual tracking has a few genuine advantages over auto-sync:
You stay in control of your data. No third-party app holds delegated credentials or has read access to your transaction history.
You actually see the numbers. Auto-sync makes it easy to stop paying attention. When you enter balances by hand, you notice things: a loan that's barely moving, a savings account that's stagnating, an investment account that's grown more than you realised.
Nothing breaks. Bank syncing integrations are an extra point of failure. They may go down, or require re-authentication. Manual entry opts for a simple, yet consistent approach.
The best tracking system is one you'll actually stick with. For a lot of people, that means simple and private, not automated and leaky.
Perch is built around manual monthly snapshots. It prioritises being simple and intuitive over complex & auomated.