A net worth tracker for UK households, projected years forward

A tracker that only records today is a diary. Useful, but it never answers the question you actually have: will we be in a materially better position in five years, or are we running hard to stand still. CrestCast projects the balance sheet instead. Every debt is amortised properly, so the mortgage balance in year seven is what a real repayment schedule at your rate and term produces, not a straight line between two points. Contributions land in the month they land. Dated changes you have planned, a pay rise, a rate change, a payment that stops, move the numbers from that month onward. The result is a net worth figure for every future period rather than one for now.

Net worth comes in monthly, annual, and an “as at” single-column view. That third one is unique to net worth: neither cashflow nor profit & loss has it, because it only makes sense for a stock. Pick a date and you get the balance sheet as it stands on that date, in one column, which is the natural way to answer “where will we be when the fixed rate ends”. You type the date, and assets, liabilities and net worth come back as three headline figures with the same breakdown, and the debt-to-asset ratio, listed underneath them.

Monthly is for the next couple of years, where the timing of a single event is visible. Annual is for the long view, out to the ten-year horizon every forecast runs. That horizon is a product decision, and here is why it stops at ten years.

Monthly and annual choose the period, and as at answers a single date instead. On the two charted views there is a second choice, inside the chart card itself, that decides what is plotted: Balance is the net worth figure itself, one bar per period. Breakdown stacks the assets against the liabilities behind it and runs the net worth line through the middle, which is where you see that a rising line is a house being bought and a mortgage being repaid rather than one number going up. Movement is the change from one period to the next. Same card, same data, three questions.

The statement is the part you will actually read. Its rows are Assets, Liabilities, Net Worth, Movement, and a debt-to-asset ratio. Movement is the change from the period before, the number that tells you whether a good month was actually good. The ratio shows the shape of the balance sheet rather than its size, and it moves most reliably in your favour as a mortgage is paid down.

Net worth is also the only statement with group subtotal rows. Fixed assets total separately from current assets, so you can see how much of your position is a house you live in and how much is money you could reach this week.

There is deliberately no subtotal column, and if you have used a tool that adds one, treat that as a bug rather than a feature. Cashflow and profit & loss are flows, so a year total is a real number. Net worth is a stock. Adding January's net worth to February's produces a figure that means nothing.

Any line can be opened. The Analysis tab drills into each holding: properties with loan-to-value, equity and the secured debt against them; loans and debt with the rate, the term remaining and the total interest; pensions; savings and investments; vehicles and everything else. Each card opens its own analysis screen.

There are six asset classes and that is the complete list: property, savings, investments, pensions, vehicles, and other. Vehicles are the interesting one. A car is not a store of value, so CrestCast depreciates it on a ladder based on its year of manufacture rather than holding it at what you paid. Most trackers let a car sit in your assets at purchase price for years, which quietly flatters the total.

Debts are mortgages, loans, credit cards and student loans, each modelled on its own terms rather than as a generic balance. A mortgage knows its rate, its term and what happens when a fixed rate ends. A credit card has its own simulator with promotional periods. See the debt side of the picture for how that works in detail.

Two of those lines are a deliberate editorial choice, and reasonable people disagree with it. Most net worth trackers leave the pension out, on the grounds that you cannot spend it, and leave the student loan out, on the grounds that it is not a normal debt: it is written off eventually, it is collected as a percentage of income above a threshold, and it does not follow you the way a loan does. CrestCast shows both, by default, because a balance sheet that hides your largest asset and your longest-running liability is not a balance sheet, it is a selective one. Defined-benefit schemes are modelled too, with an estimated transfer value feeding into the total.

What matters is knowing what you are looking at. The pension is in there and it is not spendable money. The student loan is in there and it behaves unlike the mortgage next to it. Both facts are better held in your head than solved by leaving a line out.

Take a household with a home at £340,000, a £220,000 mortgage at 4.6% with twenty-two years to run, £14,000 in a stocks ISA, a £95,000 pension pot, a car worth £11,000 and £6,000 in savings. Assets £466,000, liabilities £220,000, net worth £246,000, and a debt-to-asset ratio just over 47%.

Now put £400 a month into the ISA and £450 a month into the pension between you, and let the mortgage run. Five years out the mortgage is down to roughly £187,500, because that is what a real amortisation schedule does at that rate over that term. That figure is settled by the schedule rather than by an assumption. The asset side is not: the ISA and the pension build from the contributions landing and then grow at the rates you set, and the house moves at the property growth rate you give it. The car is the exception, depreciating on its ladder whatever else you do.

So a five-year net worth is two things added together, and it is worth reading them apart. Debt repaid and money actually put aside is arithmetic. Everything else is a growth rate you chose, and changing one changes the answer, which is the whole reason you get to set them rather than inherit someone else's.

Selling something is where naive trackers fall over. They let you delete the asset, and the debt attached to it hangs around, or the money appears in savings with no date on it. In CrestCast an asset sale is a dated event: the proceeds land in cash in the month of the sale, the linked mortgage is settled out of those proceeds, and the asset stops contributing from that month onward. Downsizing, selling a rental, selling the car, all of it lands as one coherent set of numbers rather than three manual edits you have to keep consistent.

You can also change whose balance sheet you are reading without re-entering anything. Switch between your own position, your partner's, the joint accounts on their own, or everything combined. Couples who keep some money separate get a combined total without merging two lives into one pot. More on that on the families page.

CrestCast can set your household net worth against published ONS figures. Be clear about what that is: a gut-check against national data, not a score. And it is one category only, total household net wealth. There is no income comparison, no savings comparison, no housing-cost comparison and no spending comparison. You get your household total, the median for Great Britain, the gap between them, and roughly where that places you in the distribution for your age band.

The source is the ONS Wealth and Assets Survey round 8, covering April 2020 to March 2022, published on 24/01/2025, and covering Great Britain, which excludes Northern Ireland. Those figures are a few years old and the card says so on screen. Treat the comparison as a rough bearing rather than a precise placement.

It also has conditions. It appears on the Analysis tab, and only when you are looking at the combined household view with a date of birth entered. Someone planning alone, with no partner, no children and no joint items, has no combined view to switch to and will not see it at all. Worth knowing before you sign up, if the comparison is why you are here. The blog post on UK net worth by age covers the same data without needing an account.

Set a future date on the input screen and every balance moves to what it will be then: cash, savings, assets and debts. Tap the information marker on a line and a panel opens with the arithmetic that got there. On a mortgage that is the anchor balance you entered, then each payment between now and the date you picked, split into interest and capital, with the closing figure at the bottom.

Three details are worth knowing, because they are what makes it worth reading rather than decorative. The panel adds up its own lines and, if they do not reconcile with the figure on the row, it prints a line saying so instead of quietly making the total fit. Every group of lines names the input it came from, with the anchor figure tappable straight through to the screen where you typed it. And where a figure has no honest breakdown behind it, an interest-only debt being the plain case, the row states that and gives the reason rather than showing a marker that opens nothing. So the answer to “where has that number come from” is either one tap away or explained on the row, and it is always traceable back to something you entered.

No bank connection and no automatic balance sync. CrestCast does not link to your accounts, so the balances are the ones you enter and they are as current as you keep them. For a projected balance sheet that matters less than you would think, because the mortgage and the contributions drive most of the movement. But a savings figure you last touched a year ago is a savings figure you last touched a year ago.

An investment is a single balance, not a portfolio. No tickers, no funds, no asset allocation, no live prices. There is no capital gains tax on a sale, no inheritance tax and no estate planning of any kind.

And the projection is a single line, not a range. It runs your inputs forward deterministically and shows you one path. It is a model of your decisions, which is the useful thing, but it is not a statement about what will happen. Read it as “this is what these choices produce”, not as a prediction.

Nearly everyone who cares about this has tried the spreadsheet. A tab with assets down one side, debts down the other, a date at the top. It works for a while. Then the retyping starts: seven balances, every couple of months, from seven different apps and statements. The gaps get longer, the last column gets staler, and at some point you stop.

Projecting it forward is a different order of problem. By hand you need an amortisation schedule for every debt, month by month, at the right rate for the right term, rebuilt each time a rate changes or you overpay. You need contributions landing on the right months, and the sale of the house settling the mortgage out of the proceeds in the correct month. Any one of those is a Saturday afternoon. Keeping all of them right, every time something changes, is what nobody sustains.

That is the whole argument for a tool here. The balance sheet is easy; the schedule underneath it is not. The same reasoning applies to the profit and loss side of the picture.