Why I Built Steady Wealth (And Why It's Different)

The problem I kept running into

I've been tracking net worth for years, with spreadsheets at first, then apps like Mint, Personal Capital (now Empower), and a few others. Every single one had the same problem: you had to hand over your bank logins.

Think about that for a second. To see a simple number (what you own minus what you owe), you're giving a third party the keys to every financial account you have: your checking, your brokerage, your retirement accounts. All of it.

And for what? A dashboard that breaks every time your bank changes their login page.

Every alternative wants your credentials

I looked at everything: Mint wanted Plaid access, Empower wanted Plaid access, and Copilot, Monarch, and YNAB all wanted Plaid too. The entire personal finance industry has decided that the only way to track your money is to route your bank credentials through a third-party aggregator.

Plaid paid $58 million to settle a lawsuit about harvesting user data beyond what users agreed to. This is the company that powers nearly every personal finance app. There's a detailed breakdown of why Steady Wealth never asks for your bank login.

I kept thinking: there has to be a way to track net worth without giving up the keys to your entire financial life.

Why manual entry is actually a feature

Here's the thing nobody talks about: manually entering your account balances takes about two minutes, or maybe five if you have a lot of accounts.

Two minutes, once a month (or whenever you want), and you get a complete picture of your financial life without a single bank credential leaving your possession.

Your bank login stays with your bank, and your brokerage login stays with your brokerage. Steady Wealth only knows what you tell it: account names and numbers. It doesn't even verify your real name.

Who Steady Wealth is for

This isn't for people who want to track every coffee purchase. There are great apps for that.

Steady Wealth is for people whose financial picture goes beyond a single bank account. If you own property, have business equity, hold crypto, manage rental income, or have angel investments scattered across different platforms, you know the pain of trying to see it all in one place.

Maybe you've got a rental property worth $400k, a retirement account at $250k, a brokerage account, some crypto, and a business you've been building. Your checking account shows $15,000 and that's the number you see every day, which can feel stressful. But your actual net worth might be $900k. Knowing that number gives you a more accurate picture of where you stand, because your bank balance is not your net worth.

Tracking the full picture, including the illiquid stuff you don't think about daily, is more useful than checking your bank balance alone.

What makes this different

No aggregators. Steady Wealth doesn't use Plaid, Yodlee, Finicity, or any other credential-routing service. Your banking credentials never leave your bank.

Nothing worth stealing. Even in a worst-case breach scenario, an attacker gets encrypted numbers with no identity attached: no SSN, no bank credentials, no transaction history, and nothing useful for identity theft.

Built for complex portfolios. Real estate, business equity, crypto, angel investments, collectibles. If it has value or represents a liability, you can track it.

Update on your schedule. Daily, weekly, or monthly, whatever works for you. Last values are pre-filled so you only need to change what's different.

Start tracking in 5 minutes

Create a free account, add your accounts, enter today's balances, and you've got your first snapshot. From there, it just gets better. Charts, projections, milestones, allocation breakdowns.

Your net worth is probably higher than you think, and once you start tracking it properly, you'll want to keep going.