Ask a family with two houses, a brokerage account and a 401(k) what they are worth and they can answer in a minute. Ask a family with a revocable trust, a holding company, three operating LLCs, a rental portfolio, a note between two of the companies and a SAFE in a friend's startup, and the honest answer is "let me get back to you". The number exists. It is spread across eight sets of books, four statements and a spreadsheet, and the pieces do not agree with each other.
This guide is about producing one number for a family that owns things through entities: what to count, how to avoid counting the same dollar twice, how to treat the loans between your own companies, how to value what has no statement, and how to keep the number current instead of rebuilding it once a year.
Net worth is assets minus liabilities. The formula does not change; what changes is what counts as an asset. When you own a rental property directly, the property is the asset and the mortgage is the liability. When you own it through Maple Rentals LLC, the tool you use sees "Maple Rentals LLC" as one asset with one value, or it sees the LLC's bank account and nothing else, or it sees the property and the mortgage and the LLC's bank account and adds the LLC on top as if it were a separate thing. Each of those gives a different number, and only one is right.
Add a holding company that owns the operating LLCs, a trust that owns the holding company, and a loan from the holding company to one of the operating companies, and the errors compound. Families in this position typically overstate net worth by the amount of their intercompany loans and understate it by the value of everything that has no statement.
An LLC is not an asset; it is a container. Its value is the value of what is inside it minus what it owes to outsiders. So the right way to count Maple Rentals is not "Maple Rentals: $485,000". It is: the property at $485,000, the mortgage at negative $318,000, the operating account at $18,400, the security deposits held as a liability, and so on. The LLC's net value is whatever those add up to, and it appears in your net worth once, through those lines.
The same applies one layer up. If Pine Holdings owns 100% of Maple, you do not count "Pine Holdings" and "Maple Rentals" both; you count Maple's assets and liabilities, plus anything Pine holds directly, once. Where an entity is partly owned, count your share of its net value, or your share of each line if the detail matters.
Pine Holdings lent Maple Rentals $25,000. Pine's books show a $25,000 note receivable. Maple's books show a $25,000 note payable. If you add up every asset and every liability across the family, the $25,000 appears as an asset and as a liability, which nets to zero, and that is correct: the family neither gained nor lost anything by moving money from one pocket to the other. The mistake is counting only one side, usually the receivable, because the asset side is the one people remember. That inflates net worth by the balance of every intercompany loan.
Eliminating intercompany balances only works if both sides carry the same number, which means the loan payments have to be split into principal and interest on both books every month. A note whose balance is $23,875 on one side and $25,000 on the other cannot be eliminated; it leaves a $1,125 error and a question about which company is right. Our guide to loans between your own LLCs covers the entries.
A revocable trust is you for every practical purpose: you control it, you can undo it, and its assets are yours for tax. Count everything in it as your own. An irrevocable trust is a harder question. Legally the assets are not yours anymore; economically, if you or your family are the beneficiaries, they are part of the family's wealth. The useful approach is to keep both numbers: net worth in the strict sense, which excludes irrevocable trusts you do not control, and family wealth, which includes them and labels them. Lenders want the first; estate planning wants the second.
Bank and brokerage accounts have a value every day. Real estate, private company interests, notes, a SAFE, a stake in a friend's fund, vehicles, art and collectibles do not. They need a valuation method and a schedule, written down, so that the number changes when something real happens and not when someone feels optimistic.
| Asset | Method | Cadence |
|---|---|---|
| Real estate | Automated estimate (Zillow or similar) or appraisal for larger properties; purchase price plus improvements as a floor | Quarterly estimate, appraisal at refinance or sale |
| Operating business | Book value from the company's balance sheet as the conservative number; a multiple of earnings only if you would sell at it | Book value monthly at close; multiple annually |
| Notes receivable | Current principal balance from the amortization schedule | Every payment |
| SAFE or convertible note | Cost until a priced round; the priced round's implied value after | At each financing event |
| Private fund or partnership interest | Latest capital account statement from the fund | Quarterly, when the statement arrives |
| Vehicles | Wholesale or trade-in value, not retail | Semi-annually |
| Retirement accounts | Statement value; note that it is pre-tax | Monthly |
A family worth $2.2 million with $90,000 in cash and brokerage is in a different position from a family worth $2.2 million with $900,000 in cash and brokerage, and one number hides the difference. Split net worth into liquid (cash, brokerage, anything sellable within a week at its stated value) and illiquid (property, businesses, notes, private investments, retirement accounts with penalties). The liquid share is the number that decides whether you can fund a tax bill, a capital call or a down payment without selling something, and it is the first thing a lender or an estate attorney asks about.
The Smiths own a revocable trust, which owns Pine Holdings LLC, which owns Maple Rentals LLC (one property) and Cedar Consulting LLC (an S-Corp). They also hold personal accounts, a 401(k), and a $25,000 note from Pine to Maple with a current balance of $23,875.
| Line | Held by | Value | Counted? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Checking and savings | Personal | $18,400 | Yes, liquid |
| Brokerage | Personal | $86,500 | Yes, liquid |
| 401(k) and Roth | Personal | $214,000 | Yes, illiquid, pre-tax noted |
| Home | Trust | $485,000 | Yes, illiquid |
| Mortgage on home | Trust | ($318,000) | Yes, liability |
| Rental property | Maple Rentals | $410,000 | Yes, illiquid (looked through) |
| Rental mortgage | Maple Rentals | ($262,000) | Yes, liability |
| Maple operating account | Maple Rentals | $9,200 | Yes, liquid |
| Cedar Consulting, book value | Cedar Consulting | $42,600 | Yes, illiquid |
| Note receivable from Maple | Pine Holdings | $23,875 | No, eliminated against the payable |
| Note payable to Pine | Maple Rentals | ($23,875) | No, eliminated against the receivable |
| "Pine Holdings LLC" as an asset | Trust | n/a | No, it is a container; its contents are counted above |
| Credit cards | Personal | ($3,120) | Yes, liability |
Net worth: $682,580. Liquid: $114,100, about 17% of the total. A tool that counted the note receivable but not the payable would say $706,455. A tool that listed Pine Holdings as an asset at its own book value on top of Maple and Cedar would be higher still. A tool that only saw the personal accounts would say $315,780 and call the rest "other".
Consumer trackers such as Monarch, Copilot and Empower connect to accounts, and an LLC is not an account, so the business side becomes a manual asset you type in and forget. Net worth dashboards such as Kubera let you add anything as a line and, on the top tier, tag it by owner, which solves the listing problem and none of the others: no look-through, no elimination, no books behind the number. Platforms such as Addepar do all of it, for families with a staff to run them and fees to match.
HaraPro sits in between. Every entity has its own books inside one login, the ownership map is drawn from those books, intercompany notes are linked to the payments that reduce them so both sides stay equal and can be eliminated, and the family's net worth is computed by looking through the entities rather than stacking them. Personal accounts sit next to the businesses, split into liquid and illiquid, and the number updates when a balance changes rather than when someone rebuilds the spreadsheet. The investments and net worth page shows how it looks with a real structure.
Count what the LLC owns and owes, not the LLC itself. An LLC is a container; its value is its assets minus its liabilities to outsiders. Listing the LLC and its contents both double counts.
It nets to zero. The lending company's receivable and the borrowing company's payable cancel, as long as both carry the same current balance. If they differ, fix the books before eliminating.
No. You control it and can revoke it, so its assets are yours for this purpose. Irrevocable trusts are a judgment call: exclude them from strict net worth, include them in family wealth with a label.
On a written cadence tied to real events: quarterly estimates for property with appraisals at refinance or sale, book value monthly for operating businesses, every payment for notes, each financing round for SAFEs and convertibles.
Cash, brokerage holdings and anything you could sell within about a week at its stated value. Property, businesses, notes, private funds and penalty-bound retirement accounts are illiquid. Track the liquid share separately; it is the number that answers whether you can pay a bill without selling something.