Most wealth trackers can price anything with a ticker and nothing without one. If part of your net worth is a stake in a company that doesn't trade — an angel cheque, founder shares, options from a job — that part usually ends up in a spreadsheet, or missing entirely.
See it with example data £5.99/month · free trialA public share has one honest answer to "what's it worth": the last price. A private one has several defensible answers, all different — what you paid, the last funding round, a multiple of revenue, what someone offered informally, or nothing at all if the company folds.
The two common failures are opposite and both bad. Leave it out, and your net worth is wrong by a potentially large amount. Put in the last round's paper valuation and treat it like cash, and you get a total that feels wonderful and can't be spent, borrowed against, or relied upon.
OwnWorth's position is that you should record it, value it however you can defend, and never let it hide inside a single headline number.
| Angel investments | What you invested, when, and what you believe the stake is worth now. Update the valuation whenever there's a reason to. |
|---|---|
| Founder and employee equity | Shares in a company you work for or started, held personally or through a company. |
| Ownership percentage | Your share of the company, so the figure means something beyond a number you typed. |
| Valuation history | Each change is a dated point, so you can see when a valuation moved and by how much — rather than one number silently overwritten. |
| Distributions | Dividends or income actually received are recorded as real cash, separate from paper value. |
| Companies and trusts as owners | If the holding sits in your own limited company or a family trust rather than in your name, model it that way and set your share. |
This is the distinction the app is built around. A £250,000 stake in a private company and £250,000 in a general investment account are not the same asset, however identical they look in a total.
OwnWorth keeps them visibly distinct: private holdings appear as their own asset class with their own colour throughout, so you can always see how much of your net worth is illiquid. The concentration-risk insight flags when any single holding dominates — which, for an angel portfolio or founder equity, it very often does.
Your emergency fund, cash flow and FIRE calculations are driven by what you can actually reach, not by a valuation that exists on a term sheet.
There's no correct answer, only defensible ones. In rough order of how much weight they deserve:
Whichever you choose, write it down and revisit it deliberately. A valuation you set in 2023 and never touched isn't a valuation, it's a memory.
Yes — that's what the angel and private-company classes exist for. You set the value; everything else works as it does for listed holdings.
Add the company as an owner and put the holding inside it. You then set your household's share of the company, and the arithmetic follows.
Not as a tax calculation. You can record what you invested and what you think it's worth; relief claimed is between you and HMRC.
When something happens — a round, an offer, a bad year — rather than on a schedule. The monthly check-in will remind you it exists, which is usually enough to prompt an honest look.
Private holdings are their own asset class throughout, so their share of the total is always visible, and the concentration warning fires when one holding gets large relative to everything else.
Try it with the example data Household and joint ownership →
OwnWorth is a record-keeping and planning tool, not financial or tax advice, and we are not regulated to give any. Valuations of private companies are estimates you provide; private investments are illiquid and can be worth nothing.