Personal Property: Tracking Your Assets Beyond Cash & Investments
Ann Garcia, CFP®
Head of Content & Author
Ann Garcia, CFP®
Head of Content & Author
Ann is a nationally recognized financial advisor and author who provides comprehensive financial planning and investment management advice to families, businesses, and individuals. She obtained her BA from the University of California, Berkeley, is a member of Phi Beta Kappa, and holds the Certified Financial Planner certification. Ann lives in Oregon with her husband and is the proud parent of two recent debt-free college graduates. In her free time, she enjoys running the Wildwood Trail and exploring Portland's vibrant food scene.
Tihomir Yankov, JD
Financial Advisor, Founder & CEO
Tihomir Yankov, JD
Financial Advisor, Founder & CEO
Tihomir is the Founder, CEO, and Registered Investment Advisor Representative of Tobi. Prior to founding Tobi in 2023, he was a consumer financial services attorney in private practice for twelve years. He earned his BA in Economics from the University of Virginia and his JD (cum laude) from American University. He lives on a small farm outside Washington, D.C. with his wife and middle-school son, perfecting the art of keeping their alpaca, llama, horses, and sheep in a semi-perfect state of harmony. Their rescued alpaca became the inspiration for the company's mascot.
Your net worth isn’t just about the money sitting in your bank account or investment portfolio—it also includes your personal property that holds significant market value.
But here’s the catch: physical property isn’t a liquid asset—meaning you can’t easily convert it to cash when needed. That’s especially true for vehicles: they lose value over time, and you can’t quickly sell them at full price in an emergency.
Even more important is what your car payments could be doing for you instead. Every dollar going toward a vehicle is a dollar that isn’t being saved or invested toward your long-term goals—a tradeoff that can easily add up to hundreds of thousands of dollars over your lifetime. We’ll walk through that math in more detail below.
That’s why anything you add to this card will also show up as an illiquid asset on your Net Worth Smart Card™—so you can see not just what you own today, but how those choices affect your ability to build wealth over time.
What Counts as Personal Property?
When you activate this card, you can add assets such as:
- ✔️ Vehicles
- ✔️ Boats
- ✔️ Valuable artwork
- ✔️ Jewelry
If you still have loans against any of these items, they’ll be noted both here and on your Debt Smart Card™.
🚫 Excluded: Alpacas you may owe—because, well, some things are just priceless.
Depreciation and the Real Cost of Car Payments
Unless you own a classic car or high-value art collection, most personal property is a depreciating asset—meaning its value drops over time.
And if you take out a loan to buy that property, the balance on the loan usually goes down much more slowly than the asset’s value—especially at the beginning, when most of your payment is going toward interest. That’s why it’s so common for car loans to be “underwater” for a while: the car is worth less than what you still owe.
But there’s another, often bigger problem: the opportunity cost of the payment itself. One of the biggest hurdles to building wealth is saving and investing at least 10% of your gross income. If the same 10% is tied up in car payments instead, you’re not just buying a depreciating asset—you’re also giving up the chance to grow that money over decades.
A simple rule of thumb: take your weekly car payment and multiply it by 10,000. That’s roughly what those payments could grow to over 30 years if you invested them instead at around a 10% average annual return. For example, a $100/week car payment could represent about $1,000,000 of future wealth that never gets the chance to grow—while the car itself is steadily losing value.
To help you manage this, the Personal Property Smart Card™ will alert you if:
- ✔️ Your total monthly vehicle payments exceed 9% of your take-home pay.
- ✔️ The value of your personal property is less than what you still owe on it.
Together, those signals help you see not just what your vehicles are worth today, but how much they may be costing your long-term net worth.
Video Resources
