How to Track Your Net Worth: A Free Personal Finance Course for Beginners

Most people cannot answer a simple question: what am I actually worth?

Not because they are careless. Because the answer is scattered. A salary account here, shares there, a pension from a previous job, a home, a loan, maybe some crypto, maybe an insurance policy someone will need to find later. Each institution shows one slice. None of them add up.

A lot of personal-finance advice starts in the wrong place: pick a broker, pick a fund, pick a tool. Those are later steps. The useful starting point is older and quieter. Learn what net worth is, put everything you own and everything you owe into one picture, and only then decide what to do with it.

We published a free course that teaches that sequence. It is called Personal Finance 101. Fifteen short lessons. No jargon, no prerequisites, and no account required to read it.

Why net worth, not another app

A bank balance mostly measures how recently you were paid. A brokerage app measures one corner of your life. Net worth is the only figure that does not move when you simply shuffle money from one pocket to another — and the only one that treats debt honestly.

Someone with a home worth a great deal and a mortgage almost as large is not rich by the size of the house. Net worth is the subtraction: assets minus liabilities. Once you have that number, and a few of them in a row, you can see whether the whole machine — income, spending, investing, repayment — is actually moving.

That is lesson one. The rest of the course is what to do with the picture once you have it.

What the course covers

Five modules. Read in order if you are starting from scratch; skip ahead if you already know a section.

1. Money basics

What net worth is, how assets differ from liabilities (including the cases that trip people up), why measuring changes behaviour, and why one dashboard beats seven apps. This is the foundation. If you only take one module, take this one.

2. AI for your money

AI is one module, not the headline. The lessons are practical: what today's assistants actually help with, what they invent, and which pieces of your financial life should never be pasted into a chat box. You can skip this module and still finish the course with a working picture of your money.

3. Build your portfolio picture

How to get everything you own into one view — by import or by hand — in a sensible order, without the perfectionism that makes most people abandon the project. Plus the awkward case where your money lives in more than one currency.

4. Talk to your portfolio

Once the numbers are in one place, you can ask questions about your holdings rather than generic advice: concentration, cash flow, goals, financial independence. The point is still the picture, not the chatbot.

5. Connect your own AI

The advanced finish, and optional. If you already use Claude or ChatGPT, you can point them at your portfolio through an open protocol rather than copy-pasting spreadsheets. If that sentence means nothing to you, stop after module 4. You will not have missed the point.

Living money, and what happens after

A complete picture of your finances has two jobs.

The first is the one you feel every month: what you own, what you owe, whether you are getting anywhere. That is the living-money side.

The second is the one almost nobody does until it is too late: making that same picture findable for the people who would have to deal with it if you could not explain it. Insurance policies, dormant accounts, a wallet, a nominee. Unclaimed assets are usually not a mystery. They are a filing problem.

Agni Folio is built as a wealth operating system for both jobs — tracking while you are here, and leaving a trail that can be followed. The course starts with the first job, because you cannot leave a trail through a picture you have not drawn. Legacy tools in the product are there when you are ready; they are not a prerequisite for lesson one.

How to take it

Every lesson is public and short. Each one ends with one thing you can actually do — a two-column list, a calendar reminder, a first pass at your three largest assets. You do not need to finish the course in a sitting. You do not need software. A sheet of paper is enough to start.

If you would rather not maintain the spreadsheet yourself, the core of Agni Folio is free and covers the same ground: every asset type in one view, multiple currencies, insurance, loans. Use it alongside the course, or after it. The maths comes first either way.

Start here

Open Personal Finance 101 and begin with What is net worth?

If you already know the formula and just want the picture in one place, skip to Your first portfolio. If you came for the AI part, start at What AI can and cannot do.

No signup to read. The course will still be there tomorrow.