The Numbers

I track our household net worth monthly — every account, every debt, every month — and have since July 2020. What started as a personal habit has become one of the most useful tools I have, both as a CFP® and as someone managing a household with two kids, a mortgage, and a handful of financial goals at once.

I'm putting real numbers here on purpose. Financial transparency is something I believe in professionally, and frankly, most of the financial content people see is either sanitized to the point of uselessness or wildly unrealistic (either "I'm a millionaire at 25" or doom-and-gloom). I'd rather show what a real, in-progress, slightly messy financial picture actually looks like — debt, retirement accounts, a mortgage refinance, market dips and all.

We use a hybrid avalanche approach — prioritize the highest-interest debt first, with the 401(k) loan and Discover card at the top since those carry the steepest rates. The mortgage sits in a category of its own: at 6.125% it's not cheap, but with a 30-year amortization and the size of the balance, it gets paid down passively while we focus extra payments on the smaller, higher-rate debts first.

The net worth chart only tells part of the story. A lot of the foundation for that growth was laid in the years just before tracking started — career moves, a leap-of-faith home purchase at the start of the pandemic, and a couple of family gifts that I think are important to disclose as part of full transparency.