Published 6 June 2026 · By James Chandler · 7 min read

Your real UK net worth: 5 assets every other app misses

If you ask a budgeting app what you're worth, you'll get a number that's probably out by hundreds of thousands of pounds. Here's why — and what to do about it.

I'm a finance analyst. Most days at work I look at company accounts. A company's balance sheet — the single page listing everything it owns and everything it owes — gives you a complete picture. Every asset, every debt, valued sensibly, totalled in one place.

Then I looked at my own money and realised I was managing it like a small business that only counted its cash. My banking app told me I had £8,400. My net worth was about fifty times that. Nothing in my pocket or any app I'd installed could tell me the real number.

That gap — between what apps show you and what you're actually worth — is the reason I built Wealthly. If you've never seen the full picture for yourself, this article is for you.

What "net worth" actually means

Net worth is the simplest formula in personal finance:

That's it. The whole point. The hard part isn't the maths — it's getting an honest, current value for "everything you own." UK banking apps and most budgeting tools answer that question by showing you your bank balances, maybe your credit card debt, and stopping there. They're not wrong about what they show; they're radically incomplete.

For most UK earners aged 30+, the things they own that aren't in a current account dwarf the things that are. Property, pensions, ISAs at brokers, even the car on the drive — these are the assets that move your real net worth by hundreds of thousands of pounds over a working life. If you can't see them, you can't reason about them.

The 5 assets your tracker probably skips

1. Home equity (the big one)

If you own a house, this is almost certainly your largest single asset, and it's the one banking apps cannot see. Zoopla and Rightmove will give you a guess based on opaque models. Lenders use a different number entirely — the Land Registry House Price Index (HPI), maintained by HM Land Registry and ONS. It's free, transparent, and updated monthly.

Two-step calculation:

1. Estimated current value (your purchase price × HPI movement since you bought, adjusted for local area)
2. Subtract: outstanding mortgage balance

What's left is your home equity. For a £400,000 home with a £220,000 mortgage, that's £180,000 of net worth that lives entirely outside your bank.

2. Pension pots — all three types

If you're a UK earner in your 30s or 40s, there's a good chance you have more than one pension already and don't know what they're worth combined.

• Defined contribution (DC): the SIPP or workplace pension you've been paying into. Has a pot value you can look up.
• Defined benefit (DB) / final salary: rarer for younger workers but still common among 40-somethings. You can request a "transfer value" from the scheme administrator — that's the cash lump sum the scheme reckons your future pension is worth today. If you don't want to request one, multiply the annual pension you'd get at retirement by 20 as a rough estimate.
• State Pension: log into the State Pension forecast at gov.uk. The quoted weekly amount × 52 × 20 gives you a rough capital equivalent of what the State Pension is worth to you.

For a 38-year-old with £45,000 in a workplace DC, a £12,000/year deferred DB from a previous employer, and a full State Pension forecast, the combined pension net worth is around £290,000 in capital-equivalent terms. None of which appears in a banking app.

3. Your car (yes, really)

A car is a depreciating asset, but it's still an asset. If you sold it tomorrow, you'd have cash. The right approach is to mark it at a fair current value — your purchase price minus depreciation — not at zero, and not at what you paid.

The DVLA gives you free vehicle data via its Vehicle Enquiry service. Pair that with a sensible depreciation curve (around 15-20% in year one, 10-12% per year after, with a floor at roughly 15% of new) and you have a defendable estimate. Skip this and your net worth is understated by £5,000 to £20,000 depending on the car.

4. ISAs and investments your tracker can't reach

If your investments live at Vanguard, Hargreaves Lansdown, Interactive Investor, AJ Bell or InvestEngine, the aggregator apps you might be using (Emma, Snoop, Money Dashboard) probably can't see them. Open banking — the system those apps rely on — covers current accounts and credit cards, but not investment platforms.

The practical answer is the simplest one: log into each platform once a quarter, write down the balance, and add it to your tracker manually. If you have £30,000 in a Vanguard ISA and your tracker doesn't know about it, you're missing a meaningful chunk of your retirement plan.

5. Startup shares, options, and side-business value

If you work at a startup with share options, run a side business, or hold shares in a private company, this is the most-overlooked category. Valuing it is messier than the others — but a rough number is far more useful than no number at all.

A few rules of thumb:

• Share options at a startup: take the company's latest valuation (from its last funding round, usually shared in an all-hands or available from HR), and work out what your vested options are worth as a share of the whole. Ignore unvested options for now.
• A side business: the simplest measure is retained earnings — the cash and assets the business has built up. A rougher shortcut is one to two times annual revenue.
• Private company shares: use the price from the most recent funding round. If you want to be conservative, knock 20-30% off, because private shares are much harder to sell than listed ones.

The number won't be precise. That's fine. The alternative is pretending the value is zero — and it isn't.

Why this matters — three real decisions it changes

Retirement planning gets honest. If you're wondering whether you can afford to retire at 60, the answer depends on the combined value of your pensions, your ISAs, and (eventually) your home. A bank-balance-only view will tell you you're nowhere near. A real net worth view will often show you're closer than you think.

Mortgage and money decisions get sharper. Should you overpay your mortgage or invest the spare cash? The right answer depends partly on the overall mix of where your money sits — whether you already have a lot tied up in your home, or not very much. You can't think clearly about the mix if you can only see one part of it.

Anxiety gets quieter. A lot of money worry comes from simply not knowing where you stand. A complete number, even an imperfect one, is much calmer than a partial number with a vague feeling of dread sitting next to it.

How to calculate yours this week

You can do this on a single page of paper in 30 minutes:

1. List every account: current accounts, savings, ISAs, brokerage, pensions (DC, DB, State).
2. Log into each one, write down the balance or transfer value.
3. Add an estimate for your home (use the Land Registry HPI tool), subtract your mortgage.
4. Add an estimate for your car, less depreciation.
5. Subtract every debt: credit cards, personal loans, anything else.

That total is your real net worth. It will probably surprise you. It usually does.

Or, if you'd rather skip the paper, try the free Wealthly net worth calculator — same maths, takes a minute, nothing leaves your browser.

The harder challenge is keeping that number current. Balances move every month, the HPI updates monthly, your pension contributions accrue weekly. That's what Wealthly is for — it does the calculation continuously so you can see the trajectory, not just the snapshot.

More reading: Land Registry HPI vs Zoopla: why your home's value is wrong · DB, DC and State Pension: how to track all three in one place · Best net worth tracker UK: Emma, Snoop, Aureli & Wealthly compared