Retirement planning: Understand your finances, make a worksheet to do-it-yourself easily

A household’s finances can easily fit in one worksheet of six columns, and it should be updated and maintained once a year, to begin with. The first column should list every single asset that is owned, and every liability (outstanding loans) that is owed, entered as a negative number. The second column, plus numbers against each item of column 1, would be the current market value.