Your Net Worth Is a Mirror—Not a Verdict

I checked my accounts again today. The beautiful thing about being a Financial Planner is that you get to help other people truly achieve and build a path towards their goals. You get to celebrate so many successes. The not so beautiful part? You’re likely someone who obsesses over your own numbers meticulously. (I dare the Financial Advisors reading this to deny it). Coffee brewing, laptop open to the financial planning software I use for my clients (and therefore myself). What was I looking for? I’m not sure exactly. Peace of mind? Reassurance? Something to control when life feels a little chaotic? Probably all of the above.

Everything looked fine by my standards. And yet underneath it, there was still that all-familiar question I’ve been asking myself in some form since I was in my 20s: is this enough?

I don’t think that question ever fully resolves. The enoughness of it all. It just changes shape as we age and continue to move the goalposts up, down, left, and right. In my 20s it was about survival. In my 30s it was about proving something. Now, in my 40s, it’s about living life on my terms, but also throwing everything and the kitchen sink at the financial plan trying to “break it”. This is a healthy hobby—I know.

Net worth won’t answer the question of whether I’m living life on my terms, but it is one of the more honest signals I know of for whether the decisions you’ve actually been making, day to day, are working.

The Math Is the Easy Part

Calculating it takes about ten minutes, which is almost insulting given how much weight the number carries once you have it. List what you own: cash, retirement accounts, brokerage accounts, home equity, business equity if you have it, vested equity compensation. List what you owe: mortgage, remaining student loans, car loans, credit cards. Subtract the second from the first.

That’s it. You’re done, except you’re not, because the real value is in doing it again and again. Some of us (cough, cough) have been meticulously doing this since 2012, beginning immediately after marriage and 12 months after demanding my husband (then boyfriend) “show me his numbers”. I’m quite the romantic.

What this number reveals about your life is both a lot and a little. From one view, it’s a simple measure of a point in time. From another, it’s a reckoning on how close you are to achieving your goals. It’s a huge swing between trivial and profound and one of the reasons so many people avoid checking it more than once a year.

I’d actually encourage that avoidance, to a point. Your net worth isn’t going to move much week to week, and checking it often mostly feeds anxiety without giving you anything useful in return. A market swing can shift the number without a single thing about your actual financial life changing. Once a quarter is plenty. Once a year is the floor. What you’re tracking is direction, not noise, and the difference between those two things matters more than almost anyone tells you.

The Ambition Doesn’t Turn Off Just Because the Number Is Good

For a lot of the women I work with, checking net worth isn’t about falling behind. It’s about building something: a business, a client roster, a leadership track, a second act after starting over, and the number has become one of the only ways to measure whether the thing they’re building is actually working.

That’s a different pressure than behind. It’s the pressure of wanting more, even when more isn’t strictly necessary anymore. It’s the client who already hit her “enough number” two years ago and is still stretching for another client, another quarter, another title, because ambition doesn’t come with an off switch just because the math says she could stop. It’s the woman who left a steady paycheck to start her own firm and now watches the number more closely than she ever did collecting a salary, because every dollar has become proof of whether the bet she made on herself is paying off.

I know this one from the inside. I’ve built and merged a business, climbed a corporate ladder, exited it, and I’m now building my own firm again and the net worth check has meant something different at every stage of that. Early on, it was survival math. In the years I was proving I could do this, it was scorekeeping, a way of answering whether the ambition was working or just costing me. Now it’s closer to instrument-checking. Is the thing I built actually holding, or am I still running on the fumes of proving something to someone who probably wasn’t watching that closely to begin with?

That’s the harder question underneath “wanting more.” More of what, exactly, and for whom? Some of it is genuinely about security, or options, or the freedom to make different choices later. And some of it is the same drive that got you the promotion, the client roster, the launch in the first place. A drive that’s very good at getting things done and not especially good at knowing when to stop.

I don’t think ambition is something to be cured of. I like mine. I’ve built a career and a life I actually wanted with it. But I’ve learned to ask it a question every so often: is this next stretch coming from genuine want, or from a pressure I’ve stopped noticing because it’s been running so long it just feels like personality.

What the Data Says in 2026

I’ll give you the numbers, briefly, because they’re useful as a gut check and not as a verdict.

According to the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances, the median net worth for households in their late 30s and early 40s sits somewhere around $135,000. The median, not the average: the average gets pulled up hard by a small number of very high net worth households, which makes it a worse benchmark, not a better one.

On the savings side, Fidelity reported that the combined employee and employer 401(k) savings rate hit 14.4% in early 2026, the highest on record, and still just under the 15% baseline the firm recommends. For a household earning $250,000, the difference between saving 8% and saving 15% is roughly $17,500 a year, money that compounds for decades if you leave it alone, which is its own act of trust.

Households in their 40s hold a median of roughly $221,000 in retirement savings, well below the average of $593,000, for the same reason the net worth average skews high. Fidelity’s own guideline is three times your salary saved by 40. In 2026, you can contribute up to $24,500 to a 401(k), plus another $8,000 in catch-up contributions once you turn 50.

A couple of rules of thumb are still useful directionally, though I wouldn’t treat either as gospel.

One common formula: two times your annual salary saved by 40, four times by 50.
Another, from The Millionaire Next Door, is your age minus 25, multiplied by a fifth of your annual income. A 43-year-old earning $250,000 would land around $900,000 under that math.

None of these numbers are a verdict on your worth as a person. They’re a reminder that the contribution rate you set years ago, on the income and the life you had then, may have stopped matching the income and the life you have now, and that a small increase moves more than it feels like it will in the moment you make it.

What the Number Tells You

A net worth that continues to steadily climb is usually a sign that the plan underneath it is doing its job, even when it doesn’t feel that way day to day. A net worth that stalls, or slips, while you feel like you’re doing everything right, is worth a closer look. Not as an indictment, but as information. It might mean more is leaving than you’ve clocked. It might mean debt is rebuilding somewhere you stopped watching. Either way, the number is a mirror, not a verdict.

The reverse is also true. If your net worth is solid and growing, that’s real evidence of the work you’ve put in. This is not luck, nor is it a coincidence you get to discount because it feels uncomfortable to take credit. Don’t be the person who attributes the good number to circumstance and the bad number to your character. It’s rarely that clean in either direction.

What This Looks Like at 40

By your 40s, the biggest lever usually isn’t spending less. It’s making sure the money you’re already earning is working as hard as you are, which is a different thing entirely than belt-tightening, which is often where people go. I’ll be honest though, sometimes belt-tightening is needed.

It means looking at whether your equity compensation is being managed with any intention, or just sitting there because reviewing it felt like one more thing. It means checking whether your 401(k) contributions match your current income. It means being honest about whether debt is capping how much you’re able to save without you noticing. And it means asking whether the strategy behind your investments still matches the life you’re living now.

I think about this in terms of my own life more than I’d probably admit in a client meeting. The version of me who built our savings rate in my highest-earning years wasn’t picturing this exact life: The one where I launch and merged a business, climbed a corporate ladder and then exited stage left and now back in the driver’s seat building my own firm again. I didn’t know it would look like this. And that’s the point. You build the foundation before you know what it will be asked to hold, because eventually life asks something of you that no salary, on its own, can solve.

The Number Isn’t the Whole Question

I’ve had countless conversations over the past two decades, and based on interactions with clients making career changes, pursuing goals, retiring and transitioning to a spend-down period, I don’t think the number ever stops feeling slightly insufficient, no matter which direction it moves. There’s always a version of you that wonders if you should be further along, further ahead, further something. I’ve stopped expecting that voice to go away entirely and instead have held the door open and welcomed it in. I’ve just learned to no longer let it run the meeting. (Noticing instead of resisting has been a huge learning point for me over the past few years.)

What I ask instead, for myself and for my clients: is the number moving in a direction that reflects decisions you’d actually stand behind if someone asked you to explain them?

That’s not the same question as is this enough. I don’t think that one ever gets a final answer, and I’ve made peace with not waiting for it to. But the second question does get answered, most mornings, if I’m honest with myself. It’s the only version of enough I’ve found that actually holds up when someone asks you to explain it. And it’s the one that keeps me from spending hours trying to break my own financial plan with 100 “what-if” scenarios. Which, if you know me, is a Tuesday.