How to Build Your First Net Worth Statement

Most women facing a separation are making enormous decisions on top of a picture they have never actually assembled. Sell the house. Accept the offer. Leave the job. Stay another year.

Not because they are careless — because the picture was distributed. Some of it in his name, some in yours, some in an account neither of you has looked at since 2016. Nobody was ever responsible for putting it in one place.

This is how you put it in one place. It takes about ninety minutes and it is the single highest-value thing you can do before any of the bigger decisions.

What you're building — and what you're not

You are not building a budget. A budget is about flow: what comes in and goes out each month. That is a different document for a different purpose.

You are building a position: what you own, what you owe, and the difference between them, on one date. An accountant calls it a net worth statement. It is two columns and a subtraction.

The reason it matters is not the number at the bottom. It is that a whole category of questions becomes answerable in about four seconds:

• Can I cover three months?
• Do I actually need to sell the house?
• Is the offer on the table reasonable?
• How long can I hold out?

Every one of those is unanswerable in the abstract and obvious once the page exists. That is what you are buying.

Column one — what you own

Work through this list rather than from memory:

• Cash — every checking and savings account, including the one you opened in 2014 and forgot
• Retirement — 401(k), 403(b), IRAs, pensions. Including old employer plans. Especially old employer plans
• Investments outside retirement — brokerage accounts, stock from an employer, crypto
• The house — at what it would realistically sell for today, not what you love it at, and not what Zillow says on a good day
• Vehicles — at trade-in value
• Other real property, business interests, cash-value life insurance
• Money owed to you — a loan to a sibling counts
• Anything genuinely worth money if you had to sell it. Be honest here; most household contents are not.

Column two — what you owe

• Mortgage, and any home equity line or second mortgage
• Vehicle loans
• Credit cards — each one on its own line, not a lump
• Student loans — yours, and anything you co-signed for anyone
• Medical debt
• Money owed to family
• Tax debt. People leave this off constantly. Do not.

Subtract column two from column one. That is your net worth. It can be negative. A negative number is a starting position, not a verdict — and starting positions are, by definition, where you start.

The third column almost everyone skips

Next to every single line, write whose name is on it: yours, his, or joint.

This is the column that drives nearly every decision that comes after, and it is the one people leave out because it feels like detail. It is not detail. Whose name is on an account determines who controls it, who is liable for it, and what happens to it when a household separates — and the answer is frequently not what people assume.

Three rules for doing this well

Gather before you feel ready. You will not feel ready. The feeling is not information. Make a list of institutions from memory before you log into anything — the list is faster than the logins and it will remind you of the account you'd otherwise forget.

Write down what you cannot find. This matters more than the numbers you do find. A blank line reading "his 401(k) — no idea, need the statement" is not a failure. In a divorce it is a direct to-do for your attorney, and unfound accounts are one of the most common reasons women end up with less than they were entitled to. The gaps are the point.

Date it. Write the date at the top. This is a photograph, not a permanent record. Make another one in ninety days and put them side by side — that comparison is where you will first see things moving, because progress in this work is nearly invisible week to week and unmistakable across a quarter.

If a divorce is coming, build it once

Most states require a financial disclosure — a sworn statement of assets and debts — and it asks for very nearly this information. So ask your attorney what form your state uses before you start, and gather in their order. You will be doing this either way; there is no reason to do it twice.

One thing worth saying plainly: this document is yours. Building it does not mean showing it to anyone yet, and what you disclose and when is a question for your attorney rather than something to decide alone.

What it feels like

Harder than it sounds, even when the numbers are fine.

There is a specific grief in seeing the whole of a shared life reduced to two columns, especially when some of what you're looking at was built with someone who isn't in the picture anymore. Several women have described crying partway through and assuming that meant they'd done something wrong.

It doesn't. Sit with it for a day. Then notice what the page gives you that you didn't have yesterday — which is the ability to stop guessing.