NAME Joey Kincer NET WORTH $201,000 INCOME $65,000 AGE 32 DEBT $2,000 RESIDENCE Calif. ASSETS $203,000
Joey Kincer is the kind of guy who likes to 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.
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NAME Stephanie Grant NET WORTH -$19,000 INCOME $50,000 AGE 31 DEBT $33,000 RESIDENCE Minn. ASSETS $14,000 CHILDREN 2
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.
The net-worth number, as Kincer found, is more appealing when you have someone else’s to compare it with. We tend to have an intense curiosity about our neighbors and friends, especially those who seem to earn about what we do but spend a lot more. Do they skimp on retirement savings or their children’s college funds? Are they not burdened by student loans? Do they have a trust fund? Have they simply maxed out every credit card they can get their hands on? There’s no way to answer these questions without seeing a breakdown of net worth.
So it should come as no great surprise that the curious are turning up at NetworthIQ to see what other people’s money really looks like. “This was our way of making money a little more social,” said Todd Kalhar, one of the founding executive partners at NetworthIQ, which is now part of Strands, an online-media company whose moneyStrands site competes with Mint. “People had been talking about stocks forever. We wanted to add a bit more context. The guy talking about stocks might have been bankrupt 10 times.”
Joey Kincer’s net worth is about $201,000, much higher than the $120,000 median figure for U.S. families from 2007, the last year for which the Federal Reserve Board released household net-worth numbers. Among NetworthIQ users who, like him, earned no more than an associate’s degree, that makes him a big shot. But when he compares himself with all the people his age and all Californiaresidents, he’s just a bit above average.
He earns about $65,000 a year largely as a Web developer but is determined to save enough money for a substantial down payment on a detached house, not merely a condo or a town home. And he wants to live in a particular area of central Orange County, where housing prices, while lower than they once were, are still a bit beyond his means.
And so he lives with his parents, paying $700 a month and sleeping in his childhood bedroom. There is a Garfield clock on the wall, and above a twin bed is a photo gallery of the Dream Team, including photos of Daisy Fuentes and Hilary Duff in their younger days. He recently put much of his Mega Man memorabilia in storage. “I’m trying to make my room look less like a 10-year-old’s,” he said. It is perhaps not an ideal arrangement for a young, single man. But by living at home, he is able to save $1,500 to $2,000 each month, which allows his net worth to grow at a steeper trajectory than it would otherwise.
Most of the hand-wringing we do around money essentially comes down to two basic questions: How am I doing? And, Am I going to be O.K.? Net worth is a pretty good answer to the first question and, over time, it offers hints as to how things might ultimately turn out. It’s an easy number to calculate and satisfies the desire for a single numerical grade.
But does our almost irresistible urge to rank ourselves against others based on any available data serve as a source of inspiration? Or does it lead to endless striving in search of some ever-elusive achievement? “I think this is a profound problem, this aspect of humans in the West,” said Andrew Oswald, a professor of behavioral science at the Warwick Business School in England. “We’re now extraordinarily rich by almost any standard of human history. But because we are creatures of comparison, it’s harder to get happier and happier.”
Eric Mill wasn’t thinking about his happiness when he created a Web site called Ohnomymoney two years ago. He was thinking in part about societal taboos — and how to thumb his nose at them. The site shows five numbers: his credit-card and student-loan debt, his checking- and savings-account balances and his net worth, which is currently about negative $12,400. The site updates most of the figures automatically every day through a feed from Wesabe, another site, like Mint, that pulls data from personal financial accounts.
Ron Lieber writes the Your Money column for The Times and helps oversee Bucks, a blog about personal finance.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: May 12, 2010
An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that home equity, rather than home value, is needed to calculate net worth.
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