Your net worth is the single number that sums up your financial life. It is everything you own minus everything you owe.
Net Worth = Total Assets − Total Liabilities
Your salary tells you what comes in. Your bank balance tells you what is left this month. Net worth is the only number that tells you whether you are actually building wealth or just moving money around. Two people earning the same salary can have very different net worth, because one is paying down a home loan while the other is carrying a credit card at 40% interest.
It comes down to two lists. First, everything you own, valued at today's price:
Second, everything you owe, counting only the outstanding amount:
Add up the first list, subtract the second, and that is your net worth. The calculator above does it instantly, but it helps to know what is going into it.
This is where most people get their number wrong, almost always on the low side.
If your number feels lower than you expected, you have probably missed one of these.
Always value assets at what they are worth today. A flat bought for ₹40 lakh that is now worth ₹70 lakh is a ₹70 lakh asset. The same goes for stocks, gold and mutual funds. Using purchase price is the most common reason a net worth calculation comes out wrong.
Your total net worth includes your home and your car. Your investable net worth strips those out, because you cannot spend the house you live in or sell the car you drive to work. For day-to-day tracking, use total net worth. For retirement planning, investable net worth is the more honest number, because that is what actually has to fund your future.
One caveat first, because it matters. There is no official age-wise net worth dataset for India. Anyone quoting an exact average net worth at a given age is estimating, so treat the figures below as planning targets, not facts.
A widely used rule of thumb comes from Thomas Stanley's research in The Millionaire Next Door:
Expected Net Worth = (your age × your annual pre-tax income) ÷ 10
So a 35-year-old earning ₹20 lakh a year would have an expected net worth of around ₹70 lakh by this formula. Hit roughly double that and you are saving exceptionally well. Sit well below half of it and there is likely something structural to fix, usually high EMIs or spending outrunning income. As a directional guide for Indian salaried professionals: in your late 20s, the habit matters more than the number; your 30s are the compounding decade; by your 40s, EPF, equity and property should be doing real work; and from 50, the focus shifts from growing the number to protecting it. For context on the top end, World Inequality Lab data puts the commonly cited threshold for India's top 1% at roughly ₹1.5 crore for an individual, though that is an estimate, not a government figure.
Once a year is the minimum. A good habit is to track it on the same date every year. April 1 works well for salaried Indians since it follows tax filing. The most useful trend to watch is net worth growth as a share of your income: if you earned ₹20 lakh and your net worth grew ₹8 lakh, your real savings rate was 40%. If it grew only ₹2 lakh, something in your spending or debt is leaking.
FOLO Tip: Checking once a year only ever shows you a snapshot. FOLO keeps your net worth updating on its own across 500+ sources, so you watch it move instead of rebuilding it from scratch every April.
