Ask a Kathmandu investor how they are doing and you will usually get one of two answers. “NEPSE was green today.” Or, “My portfolio is down 12 percent.” Neither tells you whether that person is getting richer. Someone can be up 30 percent on a NPR 3 lakh share portfolio while carrying a NPR 8 lakh credit card and personal loan balance at a higher interest rate than their stocks will ever earn. Their Meroshare screen looks great. Their finances are going backwards.
That is the case for net worth tracking in Nepal. Your net worth is one number: everything you own, minus everything you owe. It is boring, it moves slowly, and it is the only scoreboard that counts all of your money at once. This piece shows you how to build that number honestly with Nepali assets (shares, fixed deposits, gold, land, provident fund and the rest), how often to update it, and why checking it four times a year will do more for you than checking the NEPSE index forty times a day.
Why the daily NEPSE score is the wrong scoreboard
The stock market is the most visible part of most people’s money, and usually not the largest. For many salaried Nepali households, the big items are land or a house, family gold, provident fund balances and bank deposits. Yet shares get the attention, because they are priced every trading day and the price comes with a color.
That attention has a cost. When the only number you watch swings several percent in a week, every swing feels like a verdict. You react, and you pay commission both ways. We have written before about why most retail investors lose money on NEPSE, and a big part of it is this: people manage the number they can see, not the number that matters.
A net worth statement fixes the field of view. A 10 percent fall in a NPR 4 lakh share portfolio is a NPR 40,000 hit. If your total net worth is NPR 60 lakh, that is less than 1 percent of what you have. It still matters. It is not a crisis. And if, in the same quarter, you paid down NPR 1.5 lakh of loan principal and added NPR 60,000 to your provident fund, you actually got richer while the market made you feel poor.
That is the take of this article, and it is a firm one. Stop treating your share portfolio as your financial identity. It is one line on a balance sheet. Track the balance sheet.
What counts as an asset, and how to value it honestly
The rule that makes net worth tracking useful is simple: value everything at what you could realistically get for it, after costs, if you had to sell. Not what you paid. Not what a neighbor claims his plot is worth. What you would actually receive.
Bank balances and fixed deposits
These are the easy ones. Use the balance. For a fixed deposit, use the principal plus interest already credited, not the interest you expect at maturity. If breaking the deposit early would cost you a penalty, knock that off.
One useful habit: note which bank each deposit sits in. According to Nepal Rastra Bank directives as reported by Republica and ekantipur, individual savings and fixed deposits are insured through the Deposit and Credit Guarantee Fund up to NPR 5 lakh per depositor per institution. Anything above that in a single bank is not insured. Your net worth sheet is a natural place to spot that concentration.
Listed shares and mutual funds
Do not use the market value on Meroshare as is. That number is the last traded price times your quantity. If you sold, you would pay broker commission, the SEBON fee and the DP charge, and on any gain you would pay capital gains tax.
The tax part changed recently. According to a Ministry of Finance notice published in the Nepal Gazette and reported by ShareSansar on September 22, 2026, resident individuals now pay 5 percent capital gains tax on listed shares held for 365 days or less and 3.75 percent on shares held longer, effective that day. The Finance Bill 2083 had raised those rates to 10 and 7.5 percent only months earlier, which is itself a reason to look up the rate each time you update your sheet rather than hard-coding it.
So the honest value of a share holding is: market value, minus selling costs, minus tax on the gain. A worked example follows below. For mutual funds, use the latest NAV for open-end funds, and the market price (not the NAV) for closed-end funds, because that price is what you could actually sell for.
If you are not sure what your real purchase cost is after bonus shares and rights issues, our explainer on weighted average cost of shares in Nepal walks through it. You need that cost figure to estimate the tax.
Gold
Most Nepali households hold more gold than they think, and value it worse than any other asset.
Start with weight. Count it in tola, the unit jewelers and the Federation of Nepal Gold and Silver Dealers’ Association (FENEGOSIDA) quote in. Then use the fine gold rate as your reference. On October 15, 2026, FENEGOSIDA’s published rate was about NPR 2,88,400 per tola for fine gold.
Now the honest part. Jewelry is not fine gold. It is usually lower purity, and when you sell it back, the jeweler will not pay you for the making charge you paid when you bought it. They will typically also deduct something for purity and wastage. The exact deduction varies by shop and by piece. Our view: value jewelry at a clear discount to the fine gold rate, and use the full rate only for hallmarked bars or coins. If you want a figure, ask your own jeweler what they would pay today. That is your number.
Also decide, once, whether family jewelry is an investment at all. If your mother’s wedding set will never be sold, list it on a separate line rather than counting it at full market rate and feeling rich every time gold rises.
Land and housing
This is where most Nepali net worth estimates fall apart.
There are at least three different prices for the same piece of land: what you paid, the government valuation the land revenue office (malpot) uses for registration, and what a broker says it would fetch. The first is history. The second is usually well below market. The third is often optimistic, because brokers quote asking prices, not closing prices.
Our recommendation is to use a conservative market estimate (recent sales of comparable plots nearby, not asking prices), then subtract the costs of actually selling: broker commission, any registration costs you would bear, and capital gains tax. For individuals, the Inland Revenue Department treats tax on real estate gains as a final tax, with the rate depending on how long you held the property, so check the current rate with IRD or a tax advisor before you plug it in.
Then hold that number steady. Update it once a year, and only on real evidence (a comparable sale, a formal valuation for a loan). Land that rises on paper every quarter is a classic way to fool yourself.
Retirement and provident funds
Employees Provident Fund (EPF), Citizen Investment Trust (CIT) and Social Security Fund (SSF) balances count. They are yours, even though access is restricted. Use the balance on your latest statement.
Some people put these in a separate “locked” column, which is a good idea. It lets you see two numbers: total net worth, and liquid net worth (what you could reach within a few months). Both matter. A household with NPR 50 lakh in land and provident fund but NPR 20,000 in the bank is rich on paper and fragile in practice.
What does not belong on the sheet
Vehicles lose value every year; list them at a cautious resale value or leave them off. Furniture and electronics: leave them off. Money a relative “will pay back eventually”: leave it off until it arrives. For endowment or whole life insurance, count only the surrender value, never the sum assured.
The other side: what you owe
Liabilities are simpler to value, because the bank tells you the exact number. List the outstanding principal on each loan, not the monthly EMI.
- Home loan
- Personal loan or auto loan
- Credit card balance
- Margin or share loan
- Loans from family or friends
- Cooperative loans
Do not leave out the informal ones. Money borrowed from a relative is still owed. Also note the interest rate next to each liability. That one column often tells you more about what to do next than any stock tip. If a credit card or personal loan costs you more than you can reasonably expect to earn on shares or deposits, paying it down is the highest-return “investment” available to you, and it is risk-free.
If you have a margin loan, show it right next to your shares. When prices fall, the asset shrinks but the loan does not.
A worked example: one household, two scoreboards
Here is an illustrative household. These are made-up numbers for teaching purposes, not data.
Sita, 34, works in Kathmandu. Her husband works abroad and sends money home. Their assets, valued honestly:
- Savings and fixed deposits across two banks: NPR 9 lakh
- NEPSE shares bought for NPR 4 lakh, now worth NPR 6 lakh on Meroshare, all held for over a year
- Ten tola of family jewelry, plus a 2 tola hallmarked gold coin
- A plot in Bhaktapur, bought for NPR 30 lakh, with comparable recent sales suggesting about NPR 45 lakh
- EPF and CIT balances: NPR 7 lakh
Their liabilities:
- Outstanding home-plot loan: NPR 18 lakh
- Personal loan taken to fund her husband’s move abroad: NPR 3 lakh
- Credit card balance: NPR 70,000
Start with the shares. The gain is NPR 2 lakh. At the current 3.75 percent long-term rate reported by ShareSansar, tax on that gain is NPR 7,500. Allow a few thousand more for commission and fees. Call the honest share value about NPR 5.9 lakh, not NPR 6 lakh.
Now the gold. The coin is hallmarked, so at FENEGOSIDA’s October 15, 2026 rate of about NPR 2,88,400 per tola, two tola is roughly NPR 5.77 lakh. For the jewelry, Sita asked her jeweler, who quoted a buyback price meaningfully below the fine rate. Suppose that comes to NPR 22 lakh for the ten tola (an assumed figure for this example, not a market quote). Because this set is unlikely ever to be sold, she lists it on a separate line.
The land: NPR 45 lakh estimate, minus broker commission and tax on the NPR 15 lakh gain. She uses NPR 42 lakh, a deliberately cautious figure.
Total assets (excluding the family jewelry): about NPR 9 lakh + 5.9 lakh + 5.77 lakh + 42 lakh + 7 lakh = NPR 69.67 lakh.
Total liabilities: NPR 18 lakh + 3 lakh + 0.7 lakh = NPR 21.7 lakh.
Net worth: about NPR 48 lakh, or about NPR 70 lakh including the jewelry.
Now look at what the sheet tells Sita that her Meroshare screen never could. Her shares are under 9 percent of her assets. A 20 percent market crash would cost her about NPR 1.2 lakh of net worth. Her NPR 70,000 credit card balance and NPR 3 lakh personal loan, on the other hand, are almost certainly costing her more in interest each year than her shares are reliably earning. And her liquid net worth (deposits, shares and the coin, minus the short-term debts) is about NPR 17 lakh, which is decent, but almost all of her wealth is in one plot of land in one city.
None of that is advice for Sita. It is just what becomes visible once the whole balance sheet is on one page.
How often to update, and what to watch
Quarterly is enough for most people. Monthly if you are actively paying down debt and want the motivation. Never daily. A net worth figure that changes every day is just a stock ticker with extra steps.
Pick fixed dates (say, the first weekend of Shrawan, Kartik, Magh and Baisakh) and use the same valuation method every time. Consistency matters more than precision.
A simple spreadsheet is enough: one row per asset or liability, one column per quarter, plus totals for net worth, liquid net worth and the change since last quarter. Then add the column most people skip: where the change came from.
That last column is the important one. Net worth can grow in only three ways:
- You saved money (income minus spending).
- You paid down debt.
- Your assets went up in value.
The first two are within your control. The third is mostly luck in the short run. If your net worth rose NPR 3 lakh last quarter and NPR 2.5 lakh of that was NEPSE going up, you did not have a great quarter. The market did. If it rose NPR 1 lakh during a falling market because you cleared a loan and saved steadily, that was a genuinely good quarter.
Your net worth has to beat inflation, too
A rising net worth in rupees is not the same as getting richer. Prices rise too.
According to Nepal Rastra Bank’s macroeconomic and financial situation report covering the first two months of FY 2083/84, year-on-year consumer price inflation reached 6.34 percent in mid-September 2026 (end of Bhadra 2083 BS), up from 1.87 percent a year earlier. If your net worth grew 5 percent over the last year, you lost ground in real terms.
So once a year, compare your annual net worth growth to the inflation rate NRB reports. This is the most honest check there is. It catches the person whose net worth “grows” every year only because land prices drift upward while their savings rate is near zero. We go deeper on this in our piece on inflation and the real return on your savings.
Notes for NRN and migrant-worker households
If you earn abroad and hold assets in Nepal, keep two sheets or two columns: one for assets abroad in that currency, one for assets in Nepal in rupees. Convert to a single currency only for the total, and note the exchange rate you used. A stronger or weaker rupee can make your net worth jump or drop without anything real changing, and you want to see that separately.
For migrant-worker households, the sheet has an extra job. Remittances often vanish into land or family spending. Writing down whether each transfer built an asset or paid off a debt is one of the most useful habits a remittance-earning family can have.
The verdict
Tracking net worth in Nepal is not glamorous, and nobody in a tip group will ever post about it. That is exactly why it works.
The daily NEPSE number tells you how the market feels. Your net worth tells you how you are doing. One invites you to trade. The other invites you to save, pay down expensive debt, keep some money liquid, and stop putting your whole household’s future in one plot or one sector. If you check one number a quarter and it keeps rising faster than inflation, you are winning, whatever the market did this week.
Start this weekend. One page, honest values, fixed dates. If you have not yet set aside a buffer, our guide on where to park your emergency fund in Nepal is a sensible next step once you can see your own balance sheet.
This is analysis, not financial advice.
Frequently Asked Questions:
1. What is net worth, and how do you calculate it?
Net worth is the total value of everything you own minus everything you owe. It is calculated by subtracting your total liabilities from your total assets.
2. What assets should you include when tracking net worth in Nepal?
Include bank savings, fixed deposits, shares, mutual funds, gold, land, property, and EPF, CIT, and SSF balances. Use realistic values based on what you could receive if you sold them.
3. How often should you calculate your net worth?
For most people, quarterly tracking is enough. Update your records every three months using the same valuation method to monitor changes in your financial position.
4. Why is tracking net worth better than following daily NEPSE movements or investment tips?
NEPSE shows how your shares are performing, but net worth includes your other assets and debts. It gives you a more complete picture of your financial health and helps you focus on saving and repaying loans rather than reacting to daily market changes.
5. How can you tell if your net worth is actually growing?
Compare your net worth over time and identify whether the change came from savings, debt repayment, or asset price increases. Also, compare your annual net worth growth with inflation to see whether your purchasing power is improving.
