Net Worth Suggestion

[Sand]

Greetings,

Just saw the new little net worth calculation of the overview page. Very nice, with one issue - loans.

A loan on something of value (i.e not intangible loan like an education loan or a signature loan) has two components - the worth of the asset and the debt due on that asset. The two combine to give your equity associated with that debt. Mint has offered a place to track the debt (which is great), but no place to define the worth of the asset.

It would be nice to have a place to manually enter an asset value associated with each loan. This is the only way to get a net worth calculation worth anything. You can't ignore the asset value of a house or a car (despite the fact that cars are a depreciating asset) for the vast majority of Americans - these typically have a large amount of equity in them.

Thanks.

[Librainian]

This is a great suggestion! Should be too hard to add an offsetting asset value to account details, just be sure that you can update it periodically since an asset could appreciate/depreciate in value!

[Gaudere]

I agree, it's definitely needed for loans to get an accurate net worth.

[ptinsley]

I have a similar gripe, while I can easily do the math in my head to correct the net worth it would be really neat, and not a lot of work given the mint model of poling other sites for information aggregation to grab the value of a property.

My suggestion would be to allow people to link their mortgage to a property listing on zillow which updates quite frequently with their "zestimate" it may not be 100% accurate but it's probably close, and you can change information about your house to make it more accurate.

[Sand]

My suggestion would be to allow people to link their mortgage to a property listing on zillow which updates quite frequently with their "zestimate" it may not be 100% accurate but it's probably close, and you can change information about your house to make it more accurate.

Zillow isn't even close on my property value.

[mintfeedback]

I agree, it seems like a missing piece of the total financial picture if you leave out asset value on real estate.

[mintfeedback]

There should definitely be a field for asset values tied to loans. Net Worth is pretty much useless with out that.

Specifically relating to real estate: I'm in the industry and I can say with certainty that Zillow.com is a complete shot in the dark when it comes to accuracy. For some localities, it will be a great feature, for many others it will not be. I would suggest adding a field to manually input home values.

[Paul11710]

I just wanted to interject quickly here, because I think Sand saying his Zestimate is way off is more the exception rather than the norm. I agree with the others on this thread that zestimates imported into mint would at least give a approximate benchmark, which would be much better than nothing.

The Wall Street Journal ran an article on zestimates last year, finding in an independent study that "The median difference between the Zillow estimate and the actual price was 7.8%", and zillow has statistical breakdowns on their site for each region of the country that measure how much they have been off as well.

I don't think 7.8% is that bad at all, and it should be so easy for mint.com to pull this information as well, as you don't even need a username and password to see a zestimate for a location.

[bryanadams]

I was thinking this exact thing as well. Maybe before zestimates, you can just start by manually inputting some value?

[carey888]

I agree! Asset values are necessary for an accurate Net Worth. The ability to enter the asset values, or capture the zestimate value would be great.