Mint.com, a free online money tracking system, has just started including property values like houses and vehicles when calculating your net worth.
Previously, the service would total up your cash and other positive account balances, then subtract your credit card debt, loans and mortgage amounts, leaving you with an almost certainly negative net worth. In my case it was somewhere around -$178,000.
Now you can go into “Your Accounts” and tell it about the real things you own that have value. It uses a service called cyberhomes to estimate your home’s worth. Fortunately, it also lets you override this automatic value, since cyberhomes had no data for my house. I got an amount for my house from the local county appraisal district Web site and added in the Kelly Blue Book value for the two cars we have. Et voilà, our net worth is now approximately $50,000 in the black.
I think it could probably use a little fine-tuning but at least now I don’t feel so bad about our situation. Read more by Flexo about how to calculate your net worth.
Updated March 21, 2011 and originally published February 19, 2009. If you enjoyed this article, subscribe to the RSS feed or receive daily emails. Follow @flexo on Twitter and visit our Facebook page for more updates.
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Good to know. Thanks for the tip.
Thanks for the tip on Mint. I had been using yodlee, but this seems to have some better categorization algorithms. Both allow you to count your mortgage and loan information in your net worth, but the interface at Mint is a bit sleeker as well. When it comes to home valuation, yodlee uses zillow (dot com), which, in my area, seems more in step with what houses are actually selling for than cyberhomes is. Either way, the site is a great tool — thanks Smithee!
I used mint.com, but I decided that having all that information held by one website was not a good idea at all. although the concept is good, people really need to be vigilant in protecting their private information. especially given all the security leaks and ad hoc changes in terms of service/use (look at facebook).
I’ve always liked Mint’s interface and features. But the one thing still driving me crazy is that in order to classify all your expenses, you have to do a lot of manual editing. I wish the money management software folks would get together with the banking folks and work out a standard so that transactions could be easily and automatically classified.
Mint uses Yodlee Moneycenter on the backend, but Mint must not use it for categorization . Two years ago when I got started, Yodlee had custom categories and I think Mint just recently added that. Yodlee is usually pretty spot on for me and I normally just have to adjust Paypal transactions.
Definitely not a fan of cyberhomes as they informed me that my home value dropped so much. Good times I tell ya.