Info Advantage Blog

When money is tight and you start feeling down about your financial situation, it’s important to keep the big picture in mind. This can be done by reviewing your net worth. Plus, if you go so far as to track your net worth, then you’ll constantly have this big picture before you. This will help you to worry less and allow you to better focus on your goals.

How to Find Out Your Net Worth
Thankfully, your net worth takes more into consideration than just your paycheck. A good definition of net worth is the value of all assets, minus the total of all liabilities. Put another way, net worth is what you own minus what you owe. Generally speaking, this is why your net worth increases over time, due to the fact that you’ll owe less and less on the debts you pay.

When determining your net worth, start by making a thorough list of what you own and what you owe.

What You Own

• Home (its current value)
• Other real estate
• Automobiles and other vehicles like RVs and ATVs (leased vehicles don’t count)
• Jewelry and collectibles
• Household items, like furniture, appliances, etc.
• Retirement accounts, bonds, stocks, mutual funds
• Cash value of life insurance
• The balance of checking and savings accounts
• Cash

What You Owe

• Home mortgage principal
• Other mortgage principal
• Auto loans
• Student loans
• Credit card debt
• Other loans

Once you have all of these items in order, you’ll next plug this information into an online net worth calculator.

How to Track Your Net Worth
Now that you know your net worth, you can use a spreadsheet tool to keep track of its growth--in a similar way to how you keep track of your monthly budget. Here are four ways that tracking your net worth can benefit your financial situation.

• Financial Progress: We all want to evolve and progress in anything in life, it’s human nature. It's even better when you grow your money and can look back to the month or year previous and see how far you've come.
• Confidence Builder: For example, if you saved an extra $1,000 in your emergency fund or watch your 401K increase due to a bigger contribution, it will make you feel proud of what you’ve been able to accomplish.
• Avoid focusing on just assets: If you have 200K in assets but 100K in debt, you’re just lying to yourself. It's important to factor both into the calculation.
• Loans: Your net worth can be a factor if you plan on applying for a loan in the near future.

In the same way that it’s beneficial to keep track of your personal net worth, there are benefits to keeping track of your company’s assets. The average SMB likely needs more than a calculator and a spreadsheet to do this, which is why there are so many enterprise-level accounting solutions on the market. To learn more about what’s available for your accounting department and how technology can further your company’s goals, give us a call at (585) 254-8710.

P.S. Some businesses struggle to reliably budget out their IT, especially with surprise bills when technology goes down and unexpected updates need to take place. If you are frustrated with the unforeseen nature of your current IT, reach out to Info Advantage to discuss a managed, proactive approach.

If you’ve had your Facebook profile since the dawn of the social media age, chances are that it’s accumulated an immense amount of personal information. While you might have felt weird handing over all of this data to Facebook, the company has made it surprisingly easy to take it back; well, as much as you can, at least.

You can download your Facebook data to your device, but your reasoning for doing so could be anything. Maybe you want to have a backup copy of your data stored locally, or perhaps you’re working on a project, like a graduation collage that requires you to pull out every photo under the sun. Of course, the most likely reason that you’d want to do this is if you’re completely fed up with Facebook, and you want to close your account. Unless you download your data, all of your information would be lost, which means countless years of Facebook activity lost to the ages.

Regardless of your reason for downloading your data, Facebook makes it easy. Although, Facebook has no reason to really make downloading your data difficult, considering how they own pretty much anything that you upload anyway, whether you download it back or not. Is it too late to suggest discretion when choosing what you post on Facebook?

Anyway, to get started, log into Facebook and go to Settings. You’ll see Download a copy of your Facebook data right underneath General Account Settings. Click on it, and you’ll see Start My Archive.

This lets you select a place to store your information, like if you try to download something off of the Internet. You’re choosing a folder to download your Facebook data to, so make sure that it’s a secured folder since your Facebook data probably contains at least some sensitive information.

Granted, you might be wondering what kind of information is downloaded to your archive. Facebook explains: “This includes a lot of the same information available to you in your account and activity log, including your Timeline info, posts you have shared, messages, photos and more. Additionally, it includes information that is not available simply by logging into your account, like the ads you have clicked on, data like the IP addresses that are logged when you log into or out of Facebook, and more.”

Depending on how heavily you have used Facebook over the years, you might be looking at a rather large download. However, downloading all of your data in one sitting is probably going to be more valuable and convenient than going through each individual post and manually selecting what you’d like to download.

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