There was a two-year stretch where I knew, roughly, what was in every account we owned — and refused to add it up. I could tell you the checking balance to the dollar. I could not have told you our actual net worth within twenty thousand dollars in either direction, and I liked it that way. Adding it up felt like tempting something. As long as I didn't do the math, the number couldn't disappoint me.
I ran a business for ten years. I know how to read a P&L. I am not bad with money in any way that shows up on paper. What I had was a very specific, very common form of financial avoidance: I'd track the inputs obsessively and refuse to look at the output. That's not caution. That's an ostrich with a spreadsheet.
The Tool That Made Me Look
I finally broke the habit with something I now do every quarter and teach in coaching sessions, because it's simple enough that avoidance stops being an option: the Net Worth Snapshot. Fifteen minutes, four times a year. List everything you own — accounts, home equity, vehicles, retirement — on one side. List everything you owe on the other. Subtract. Write the single resulting number down, with the date, in a place you'll see it again.
That's the whole tool. There's no budgeting category, no app subscription, no behavior change required to do it the first time. Its entire power is in what happens the second time you do it — because now you have two numbers instead of one, and two numbers make a trend line. A trend line tells you something a single balance never can: whether the direction is right, regardless of how uncomfortable the current number feels.
How to run it: Pick a recurring date — the first Saturday of the quarter works well. Pull up every account you have access to and write down the balance. Do the same for debts: mortgage, auto loans, cards, anything owed. Subtract total debt from total assets. Write that single number in a notebook or spreadsheet with the date next to it, no other numbers, no month-to-month self-judgment. Then close the file until the next quarter. The snapshot isn't a monitoring system. It's a checkpoint.
"The plans of the diligent lead surely to abundance, but everyone who is hasty comes only to poverty." — Proverbs 21:5
Why the Avoidance Happens
Behavioral economists have a name for what I was doing: the "ostrich effect" — the documented tendency for people to actively avoid checking financial information specifically when they expect it to be bad news, even when the checking itself costs nothing and the information could help them. Studies on this go back over a decade now, and the finding holds up embarrassingly well: investors log in to check their portfolios far less often in down markets than up ones. We don't avoid information because we're careless. We avoid it because ignorance feels, temporarily, like protection.
It isn't. Morgan Housel makes a version of this point that stuck with me — that most financial outcomes aren't decided by one dramatic decision but by a long accumulation of small, boring, repeated ones, compounding quietly in a direction you can't see without checking. Darren Hardy calls the same principle the compound effect: tiny, unglamorous choices, repeated consistently, that produce either wealth or ruin so gradually you don't notice which one is happening until you finally look. You cannot steer a trend you refuse to measure. The checking isn't the hard part. The checking is what makes correction possible.
Let's Be Honest About What the Number Represents
Here's the part I had backwards for two years: I thought the net worth number was a verdict on my worth as a provider, a husband, a man who was supposed to have this figured out by now. It isn't. It's a snapshot of decisions, most of which are still in front of you, not behind you. The first time I finally did the math, the number was worse than I'd hoped and better than I'd feared — which is, I've learned, what the number almost always is once you stop imagining it. The imagined number is always scarier than the real one, because the imagined number has no edges. The real one does.
Scripture doesn't treat an honest accounting as shameful — it treats it as basic stewardship. The parable of the talents isn't about the size of what each servant was given. It's about what each one did with it, and the servant who buried his portion out of fear is the one who gets rebuked, not the ones whose numbers went up or down through honest effort. Fear of the number and burying the number are the same behavior wearing different clothes.
What Changed Once I Started Looking
Four quarters in, I don't dread the Saturday morning anymore. Some quarters the line goes up. One quarter, after a truck repair and a wedding, it went sideways. None of that was information I could act on while I was avoiding it. All of it became information I could work with the moment I wrote it down. My wife and I now do the snapshot together, which turned a private anxiety into a shared five-minute conversation four times a year instead of a silent one running in the background of my head every day.
I'm not telling you the number will be good. I can't promise that, and neither can anyone selling you a book about it. I'm telling you the number is more bearable known than imagined, every single time, and that the fifteen minutes it takes to find out is cheaper than the two years I spent not knowing.
What's the number you've been avoiding? Not the big one — just the next honest look. When's your Saturday morning?