Net-Worth Obsession

Net-Worth Obsession Joey Kincer is the kind of guy who likes Tarpsto keep records. Kincer is a 32-year-old Web developer who lives in San Juan Capistrano, southeast of Los Angeles, and among the things he tracks on his personal home page at kinless.com are his collection of action figures based on the Mega Man video games (“Not for sale,” the site warns sternly), the piano awards he received as a child (“My mom kept track of them all,” he says) and a photo gallery of female celebrity crushes that he refers to as his Dream Team.

His highest achievement in record gathering, however, is contained in a Quicken file, where he has tracked his personal finances for 16 years, ever since he was in 11th grade. On a recent Wednesday evening, Kincer punched a few buttons on a keyboard and projected his entire financial history onto a giant screen hanging from the ceiling of his bedroom for me to see. There was the $3.38 he spent on chips and dip on March 16, 1996. A birthday card for a friend a few weeks later cost $3.18. Deposits arrived in small amounts every couple of weeks thanks to a job playing piano at church.

This trove of data came in handy a few years ago when Kincer happened upon a Web site called NetworthIQ, which allows people to record their net worths and display the ups and downs for anyone to view. Most people who share their data do so anonymously, but Kincer posts a link to his personal Web site, where he uses his real name. Kincer especially liked that the site allowed him to compare himself with others. It appealed to the Mega Man player in him. “NetworthIQ is kind of a game,” he said. “Can I get ahead of everyone? Can I be up there with the big shots?”

Net worth is the number you get when you subtract what you owe from what you own. You start with things like cash on hand, retirement savings and home value and subtract your mortgage, as well as credit-card, student-loan and other debts. Net worth paints a bigger picture than income; it rewards the saver and reveals the drain that big borrowers put on their finances. And it vividly reminds people who think only in terms of monthly payments that their debts may be with them for a good long while.

Figuring net worth isn’t hard, and programs like Quicken make it especially easy. Mint.com, a popular personal-financial-management service, introduced a net-worth feature in 2008 that links to credit-card, brokerage and mortgage accounts. The real-time, intraday updates allow people to obsessively check in on the microscopic daily ups and downs of their personal wealth.