@Ibrahim: Many PF bloggers use NetWorthIQ and I jumped on the bandwagon as well. I wrote an in depth post about it here: http://narrowbridgeadventures.blogspot.com/2008/10/my-net-worth-whats-deal.html

Stephanie’s Off-The-Top-Of-Her-Head NetworthIQ Tips:

1. Think carefully about how you want to categorize your assets and liabilities. NetworthIQ helps a bit with this, by telling you what it means by different categories, but sometimes you have to make your own decisions. Like one time I owed money directly to my school, in addition to my student loan debt. Is that a part of student loans, or is that an “other liability?” Only you can decide, but it’s best to decide from the beginning.

2. In the same vein, think carefully about how you’re going to value things, and whether you’re going to include them at all. There’s a “personal property” category – I could value all of my clothes, computers, and furniture and track it in there… but frankly, that would be a pain, and who cares anyway? For bigger things, like cars or property, what metric will you use to value them? Will you depreciate your car’s value? By what method? These are some things I didn’t think about… and then later realized my car was, in fact, depreciating. And I had to play catch-up later, because I don’t like to go back and change numbers months later (it would mess up my blog entries!).

3. Decide public/private very carefully. I’m in a position where having that information public is advantageous to me – most people are not in that position. Once information gets out of the bottle on the internet, it can never truly be put back in.

4. Have fun with it! I’m a data head, so doing it on the same day each month and tracking things carefully and getting accurate numbers is important (and sadly, fun) for me. But it’s nothing worth going nuts over. A lot of people are seeing (or have seen recently) big drops – that’s life, don’t let it get you down.

5. A good friend of mine signed up for Mint because it would make putting his numbers into NetworthIQ easier. He just logs into Mint once a month and copies the numbers over. Not a bad plan! I do something very similar, but using the MyPortfolio feature that I get with my Bank of America accounts. Same concept.

6. Don’t get too hung up on comparing yourself to other people’s net worths on the site. It’s a nice feature, but then you remember that signing up is free, and the info is self-entered: in other words, a lot of people log on and make stuff up. “Look, I’m a billionaire! This chart says so!” That makes the comparisons virtually useless.

Thanks for the update on your personal journey. These updates are one of my favorite parts of personal finance sites.

Keep up the progress! We are rooting for ya!

Obviously you are partial to networthiq, any tips on starting out with it?