Let’s look at the definition of an asset. The definition from Wikipedia is “…an asset is any resource owned or controlled by a business or an economic entity.”

This means that everything you as a private person own and is valuable to somebody else is an asset. But not every asset is relevant for financial freedom, so I focus only on assets which already generate cashflow or can be traded easily with something who does generate cashflow, like:

1. Savings in bank accounts
2. ETFs, Shares & Bonds in (depots / brokerage accounts)
3. Savings in pension funds
4. Savings in retirement accounts (3rd pillar in CH)
5. Cash
6. Cryptos
7. Precious metals (gold, silver, palladium, etc.)
8. Loans you gave out
9. Privately held companies
10. Real estate you rent out
11. etc.

I tend not to focus on assets which are not generating cashflow, do decrease fast in value or are hard to trade:

1. Cars
2. Jewellery
3. Watches
4. Art
5. Rent deposit
6. Shares from early stage start-ups
7. Real estate you own and live in*
8. etc.

*This is actually somehow disputable. On one hand, if you own and live in your house it’s not generating cashflow and can not be sold/traded easily because you are living there. On the other hand you could argue that you could move out, sell it and go rent a place at any time. So feel free to do whatever you think is right.

Value of each asset

Every asset which is traded publicly has a actual price based on the last trade, so the value of these assets can be looked up.

For everything else I would take a price you are 100% sure to get for the asset and be rather on the safe side. I don’t try to polish the sum of my assets, since it will be used for calculations I would like to trust.

How to summarise and monitor my assets?

I use a simple spreadsheet where I update the value of my assets over time. You can create your own spreadsheet or use my personal FIRE template.