A net worth tracker without the usual compromises
Every other option asks you to pick one: hand over your bank logins, or accept a chart that goes flat the moment life gets busy. MoneyOnFIRE does neither.
Open my trackerTrade-off #1
Aggregator trackers: convenience, with strings attached
Mint, Monarch, Empower, and most other "live" net worth apps work by pulling balances from your banks, brokerages, and credit cards through a third-party aggregator like Plaid or Yodlee. That convenience ships with two real costs.
Problem A — Trust
You're handing your bank credentials to a chain of third parties you've never audited. Aggregator networks have been breached. Your transaction history is valuable marketing data. Even the "read-only" guarantees only extend as far as the weakest link in that chain — and the chain is long.
Problem B — Coverage gaps
Aggregators can only see what exposes an API. That leaves out private business equity, physical real estate, rental property owned through an LLC, crypto in cold storage, foreign accounts, collectibles, pension values, I-bonds, and company stock at pre-IPO employers. For a lot of FIRE households, that's the biggest part of the picture — and it's simply missing.
Trade-off #2
Privacy-first trackers: private, but frozen in time
The usual answer to "I don't want to link my bank" is a manual tracker or a spreadsheet. That fixes the trust problem, but it introduces two new ones that together are the reason most people quietly abandon their tracker after a few months.
Problem C — The chart goes flat
You enter balances in January, the market rallies 8% over the next quarter, and your chart has no idea. Every visit starts with a Sunday-night data-entry ritual: log into six accounts, copy balances, paste, save. Miss a month and the line looks dead even though your portfolio is doing fine.
Problem D — Life doesn't pause
Your 401(k) deferrals kept hitting every payday. Your employer match posted. Your mortgage principal dropped a little each month. Your auto loan amortized on its fixed schedule. None of that shows up in a manual tracker until you re-enter everything by hand — and even then, it's a snapshot, not a line.
MoneyOnFIRE solves all four
Instead of picking one trade-off, we built the tracker from a different starting point: you keep ownership of every balance, and the engine does the work of keeping the line alive between the times you check in.
You keep your logins
Solves Problem A
No Plaid. No credential vault. No third-party aggregator sitting between you and your banks. We never ask for a username, a password, or an OAuth token. There is nothing for an attacker to steal, because we never held it in the first place.
Everything goes in, not just things with APIs
Solves Problem B
Private business equity, physical property, rental income streams, crypto in cold storage, foreign accounts, collectibles, a family farm, pre-IPO equity — if you can put a number on it, it belongs in your plan. Nothing gets left out because it doesn't expose a developer interface.
Market data keeps the chart alive
Solves Problem C
Between the snapshots you enter, your investment balances are revalued each day against real index and ETF prices. Open the tracker six weeks later and the line will already reflect what the market actually did — no Sunday-night data entry, no stale chart.
Contributions and paydown keep flowing
Solves Problem D
Your 401(k) deferrals, employer match, IRA contributions, 529 deposits, and taxable savings flow into the chart on their expected cadence. Mortgages, auto loans, and student loans amortize on schedule. The line moves the way your life actually moves, not the way a spreadsheet remembers January.
We call the combination of #3 and #4 shadow tracking. It's a projection, not a feed — so when you come back and enter fresh balances, the tracker writes a true snapshot, anchors the line to your actual numbers, and resumes shadowing forward from there.
Side by side
| Aggregators | Manual / spreadsheets | MoneyOnFIRE | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Asks for bank credentials | Yes | No | No |
| Tracks assets with no API | No | Yes | Yes |
| Updates with market moves between visits | Yes | No — line goes flat | Yes, daily |
| Tracks scheduled contributions & debt paydown | Partial | No | Yes, on real schedules |
| Tied to your FI plan | No | No | Yes — same engine as the calculator |
Private, complete, and always current
No bank linking. No coverage gaps. No Sunday-night data entry. Just your plan, your numbers, and a chart that keeps moving.
Open my net worth tracker