Your fix: the coordinate that decides everything

When a sailor has to choose a course, the first thing they do isn't to look at where they want to go.

They look at where they are.

At sea, the current moves the boat even when the wind is still. GPS and nautical charts exist for exactly this reason: to figure out where you really are, not where you think you are.

That check has a name. It's called a fix: the precise position of the boat on the chart at a given moment. You get it from GPS or, the old way, by triangulating two or three lighthouses visible from the coast.

It's a coordinate. A small cross on the page. Without that cross, every course you plot is just a guess.

Personal finance works the same way.

Your coordinate is your net worth: how much, today, everything you own is worth minus everything you owe. Most people don't know it precisely.

And that's where the trouble starts.

The tools that ask the wrong question

Open any personal finance app. What does it ask you?

"How much did you spend yesterday?"

"What's your monthly budget?"

"What's your income?"

These are all operational questions. They're about flow — what comes in, what goes out, what you'd like to contain. None of them are positional. None of them tell you where you are.

There's a reason apps work this way. Flow is easy to measure — just categorize bank movements. Position, on the other hand, requires summing heterogeneous wealth (houses, funds, ETFs, durable goods) and subtracting debts you sometimes don't even see (remaining mortgage, forgotten instalments, car leases). It's slower and less satisfying work than "look how many coffees you bought this month." So the market pushes you where it's easy to push you.

The problem is that operating without knowing your position is blind.

You can track every coffee and every bill for years and still be off by tens of thousands when you estimate your real wealth. Studies on the subject show that the vast majority of people miss their net worth by over 30% — usually overestimating.

You overestimate because you double-count (the value of the house you're still paying off on a mortgage).

Because you forget (pension funds, small liabilities, recurring instalments).

Because you live in the feeling of the moment (this month went well, so I'm doing well in general).

And when you have to decide something big — buying a house, changing jobs, helping a child — feeling isn't enough. You need facts. You need the coordinate.

What net worth actually is

To be clear: net worth is not your bank balance.

It's not your salary. It's not your budget. It's not how much you spent or saved last month.

It's an extremely simple subtraction:

Everything you own (positive assets) MINUS everything you owe (debts, liabilities).

Among positive assets: liquid bank accounts, government bonds, ETFs, stocks, real estate at current market value, pension funds, accrued severance.

Among debts: remaining mortgage, car lease, personal loans, instalments still due.

Some goods — like your car, furniture, appliances — are a special kind of asset: they have value, but a value that decreases over time. They should be counted at their current residual value, not the price you paid. A car bought for 30,000 three years ago is probably worth 18,000 today: that's the number that goes into the calculation.

Quick example.

Marco has: 12,000 in liquidity on his bank account, 25,000 in ETFs, a house worth 200,000 today, a car worth 15,000. He also has a 130,000 remaining mortgage and an 8,000 personal loan.

His net worth is 12+25+200+15 minus 130+8 = 114,000.

Not his salary, not his monthly savings, not what's in his bank account right now. His absolute position.

In Cashfulness, every transaction you record automatically updates your coordinate, because the accounting engine works in double-entry — the same technique companies have used for six hundred years: every movement has two sides that balance, and the net result propagates to your wealth in real time.

You see a number. That number is your fix.

Your salary, on the other hand, is the wind. It blows, it can change direction and intensity, it can carry you fast or leave you still. But the wind isn't the position.

Knowing how much you earn without knowing how much you have is like knowing your speed without knowing where you are.

What changes when you have the coordinate

The next three examples are hypothetical — the numbers aren't anyone's in particular, they just give you the idea. What changes in all three is the same: the coordinate turns a gut decision into an informed one. It doesn't tell you what to do. It tells you where you're starting from.

First: buying a house, or waiting another year.

Without the coordinate, you decide based on your salary and a feeling ("this year I feel more solid").

With the coordinate, you do the real math. Required down payment: 50,000. Current liquidity: 70,000. So yes, you can do it. But after the down payment you'd be left with 20,000 in liquidity on 5,000 of monthly expenses — four months of cover, not six.

If the plan was a six-month safety net, this year isn't the moment yet. You wait, you accumulate another 10,000, and next year you buy without anxiety.

The coordinate didn't tell you not to buy. It told you under what conditions you can do it without breaking the boat.

Second: changing jobs to less pay but more meaning.

Without the coordinate, you decide on faith or on fear — usually fear wins.

With the coordinate, you calculate how many months you can sustain the transition. If you have 30,000 in liquidity and your minimum expenses are 2,500 a month, you have a year of runway even without income.

The leap stops being a blind act and becomes an informed choice. Maybe you decide not to do it anyway, but you decide knowing what you're doing, not because your hands are shaking.

Third: lending 15,000 to a child to start a business.

Without the coordinate, you say yes out of love or no out of fear. Both answers are blind.

With the coordinate, you see that 15,000 going out from your liquidity still leaves you above the safety threshold you've set yourself. So you say yes, and you say it without anxiety.

Or you see that below 15,000 you'd go into stress, and you offer 8,000 with the option to review more in six months. It's an honest yes, not a fear-yes dressed up as love.

In all three cases there's no asceticism. No one is telling you to give anything up.

The coordinate doesn't constrain, it orients. Knowing where you are doesn't stop you from going where you want. It actually lets you.

The ten-minute ritual

Once a week, take ten minutes. Open Cashfulness, look at your coordinate, look at how it has moved compared to seven days ago.

Almost always, you don't have to do anything.

It went as you expected, you're where you expected to be, the course holds. Good.

After a few weeks something you didn't expect starts to happen. The thought that came back every now and then — am I doing well? Am I doing badly? — quiets down. Not because everything always goes well, but because you stop having to imagine it. There's a number. It's up to date. You can look at it whenever you want. And almost always, that number tells you the course holds.

It's the difference between having a background anxiety and having a background fact. The second one costs much less energy than the first.

The few times the coordinate tells you something different — an unexpected expense bigger than predicted, an asset that has dropped in value, a debt that has grown because you forgot a direct debit — you know it now, before it becomes a problem.

You don't find it out six months later, when you have to reroute in emergency.

People who don't have a coordinate for years usually end up in one of two scenarios.

Either they discover, in a bad moment (job loss, divorce, illness), that they have less than they thought — and they have to recover, in a hurry, things that take time.

Or they discover they have more than they thought, and they realize only in hindsight that they deprived themselves for years of things they could have afforded without trouble.

Both scenarios are expensive, in different ways.

Cashfulness doesn't make decisions for you. It doesn't tell you whether to buy a house, change jobs, or help a child. It gives you the coordinate to start from. The rest is your choice, and you make it informed.

And your coordinate stays yours, always. It's sensitive data and we treat it as such.

— Vittorio