How I Calculate My Net Worth Including CPF Balances
When I first sat down to write out my balance sheet, I had a coffee on the table from a small laneway cafe in Melbourne and a CPF statement open on my laptop. The contrast felt right. Australia and Singapore both run mandatory savings schemes that quietly build wealth in the background, and I keep my money across both systems. A proper net worth tally has to include all of it, or the number is misleading.
The basic idea of net worth is almost embarrassingly simple. Take everything you own, subtract everything you owe, and you arrive at a single figure that captures your financial position at one point in time. Schoolteachers and financial advisors have used the same line on a whiteboard for decades. In practice, the calculation gets messy the moment you hold multiple currencies, retirement accounts, restricted savings, and a mortgage on a place you bought a few years ago.
Plenty of free calculators online skip over the awkward parts. They happily add your checking account and your investment portfolio, then ignore the Central Provident Fund balance entirely. For a Singaporean whose retirement savings live inside CPF, this is a glaring omission. The OA, SA, and MA balances are real money. They earn guaranteed interest and they can be drawn down for specific milestones, so they deserve a line in any honest spreadsheet.
This piece walks through the way I personally build the number each month, line by line. It is not advice, and the figures are mine alone. If you want to see how I think about household spending side by side with the savings picture, my monthly grocery breakdown covers the smaller end of the ledger.
Why I bother tracking net worth at all
People track net worth for different reasons. Some want to retire by 50. Some want to pay off the home loan faster than the bank and prospectus assumes. My motivation is more modest. I want a single number that tells me whether the choices I made last month ended up making me richer or poorer after adjusting for the markets.
Income tells you how hard you worked. Expenses tell you how much you spent. Net worth is the only one of the three that captures both at the same time, and that is why I find it useful. Two months can have the same pay cheque and the same dinner bills yet leave you in very different positions depending on what the stocks did, whether you topped up CPF, or whether you put extra into the mortgage.
I started the habit years ago out of curiosity, almost the way some people track their daily steps. Once the spreadsheet existed, the act of updating it forced me to look at things I would rather avoid. Credit card balances I had been mentally rounding down. A brokerage account I had not opened in months. The discipline of writing them down, in cold figures, every month, changed my behaviour more than any budgeting app ever did.
What goes into the assets column
On the asset side I list every account I can actually access without penalty, plus the ones I can access under specific rules. Cash in the local bank account. Cash in the high-interest savings account. The emergency fund sitting in a Singapore dollar term deposit. A small AUD balance held in an Australian everyday account for when I fly back to Sydney and want a flat white without the conversion sting at the airport ATM.
I hold a mix of Singapore and Australian assets, which adds a small wrinkle. For the spreadsheet, I convert everything into Singapore dollars at the spot rate on the day I take the snapshot. The rate does not matter much in the long term because FX moves cancel out over the years, but it can move the total by a percent or two in any given month, and I want to know what is driving the change and what is currency noise.
I also keep a separate line for the small things that do not really move the needle. The written-down value of my vehicle. A modest jewellery collection I could sell if I had to. A camera lens that is worth more than I paid for it, which is a nice surprise. None of these items is large enough to make or break the number, but skipping them would feel like cheating.
How I value my CPF holdings each month
The CPF balances are the most important line in the whole spreadsheet, and also the most argued about. The Ordinary Account, Special Account, and Medisave Account each have their own balance. I add them up as a single CPF figure for the headline total, then break them out in a small table underneath so I can see how each one is changing.
I value each account at its stated balance. The OA earns 2.5 percent guaranteed, the SA earns 4 percent, and the MA earns 4 percent as of the rates I am tracking. These are real returns on real money, and treating the face value as the asset value is the most conservative way to do it. I do not try to project future contributions or assume any extra interest above the published rates. Whatever sits in the account on the snapshot day is what goes in the spreadsheet.
Australian superannuation works in a similar spirit, with one big difference. Super is a tax-advantaged wrapper that usually invests your balance in a mix of shares and bonds, and the value moves with the markets rather than earning a fixed rate. I value it at the published balance converted to SGD on the snapshot day. If you only ever worked in Singapore, you can skip that part of the calculation entirely.
Where Singapore Savings Bonds and SGX shares sit
Singapore Savings Bonds get their own treatment. Each bond has a face value plus accrued interest, and the published redemption value for the current month is what I use. The numbers come straight from the monthly statement, so this part of the routine takes about thirty seconds.
SGX stocks are trickier. I value each position at the last done price on the snapshot day, which is close enough to the mark-to-market for a monthly view. Dividends only count once they hit my brokerage cash account, not when they are declared. I treat the holdings as long-term investments and do not try to second-guess them in the spreadsheet, which keeps the numbers honest.
For both SSBs and SGX shares, I keep a separate page that records the cost basis. That way I can also see realised and unrealised returns alongside the net worth picture, without contaminating the headline number with guesswork about future moves.
Subtracting liabilities without flinching
On the liability side, I list the home loan outstanding, any car loan if I had one, and the credit card balance carried over from the previous cycle. I pay the credit card in full most months, so the line is usually zero, but when it is not, it goes into the spreadsheet at the full statement balance.
I do not subtract the minimum payment or the due amount. The full balance is what I owe. Anything less and the number understates my real position, which defeats the point of doing this in the first place.
A mortgage on a Sydney or Melbourne apartment makes the liabilities side of the total quite prominent. The property is usually the largest asset on the other side, but the outstanding loan can still sit in the six- or seven-figure range depending on the suburb and when you got the keys. Tracking both sides honestly is the only way to see whether the gap is closing or widening, and that is one of the more useful signals my spreadsheet gives me each month.
The monthly routine and the spreadsheet layout
I do the update on the first Sunday of each month, before lunch. Doing it on the same day removes the temptation to cherry pick a moment when the market looks good. The whole routine takes about twenty minutes once the templates are set.
The columns are simple: account name, balance in local currency, balance in SGD, and a note for anything unusual. One row per item. Below that, a category subtotal for cash, investments, CPF, super, and property. Below the liabilities list, a grand total. A small summary block at the bottom records the headline number and the percentage change from the previous month.
For the parts that I can automate, I rely on a setup I wrote about in this automation walkthrough. Anything that pulls from a bank feed or a CPF statement fills in automatically, leaving me to type in only the brokerage and SSB numbers by hand. The hand-typed entries are also the ones I look at most closely, which is the point.
How I group each line in the spreadsheet:
| Category | Items included | Valuation method | Frequency |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cash and near cash | Bank accounts, high-interest savings, AUD everyday account | Statement balance, spot FX | Monthly |
| CPF | OA, SA, MA balances | Stated balance, no projection | Monthly |
| Superannuation | Australian super balance | Reported balance, spot FX | Quarterly |
| Singapore Savings Bonds | SSB holdings | Published redemption value | Monthly |
| SGX shares | Listed stock holdings | Last done price on snapshot day | Monthly |
| Property | Primary residence | Most recent valuation, minus outstanding loan | Half yearly |
Recommendations for getting started yourself
- Pick a fixed day each month and stick to it, the same way you would for a regular meeting.
- Value your CPF at the face balance and resist the urge to project future interest into the headline.
- Convert foreign currency holdings at the spot rate on the snapshot day and accept the noise as part of the routine.
- List the full balance on the liability side, not the minimum repayment.
- Keep a separate page for cost basis on your investments so the headline number stays free of guesswork.
The first month is the hardest, partly because you have to type out the balances you have been avoiding and partly because the number itself can be confronting. Once the template is in place, the habit tends to run itself, and the monthly figure becomes a quiet anchor for every other financial decision you make over the year. If you want to see how I think about the smaller end of the ledger, or how I automate the parts that can be automated, the rest of my notes live on Financial MTC, where I keep the full set of personal finance observations in one place.