So, how much am I actually worth?
To keep track of my asset growth, I used to pick a fixed day at the beginning of each month to calculate my total net worth. The whole process would take about an hour to arrive at a single number. After I started using n8n, it runs automatically at a set time every day, calculates my total assets, and sends me the result via push notification.
The biggest advantage? Data density. What used to be a monthly snapshot is now a daily one. Changes in my assets become much more granular. And it saves me a massive amount of calculation time.
Calculating Total Assets: Adding Up Different Asset Categories
The hardest part of implementing n8n is breaking down the workflow. That’s why understanding how we originally did things manually is so important.
I have four to five main types of assets, including:
- US stocks (denominated in USD)
- US dollar cash
- Taiwan stocks (TWSE)
- TWD deposits across different bank accounts
- Other assets (including negative values like loans, insurance, and real estate)
On the day I do the calculation, I take a snapshot at that moment, writing down the total value of every asset into a spreadsheet like this.
In the image above:
- 1 is US stocks (sorry, can’t let you see what we used to hold!)
- 2 is USD cash
- 3 is Taiwan stocks
- 4 is total TWD in bank accounts
- 5 is other assets
- 6 is the calculated grand total
- 7 is the exchange rate
One crucial number here is the exchange rate. Since I use TWD (New Taiwan Dollar) as the base currency for total asset calculation, all USD-denominated assets — US stocks and US dollar cash — need to be converted to TWD at the current exchange rate.
This entire process has been converted into the following n8n workflow. Let me walk you through how it works.
Using n8n HTTP Requests to Fetch US Stock Quotes via API
For US stocks, I use the API provided by Finnhub.
Once you sign up with Finnhub and get your own API token, you can read the stock ticker symbols from your spreadsheet and pass them into the API call. The response returns the current stock price, including opening and closing prices.
I use the closing price, which gets written back to the Price cell. The Value is simply Price multiplied by Quantity.
Using n8n HTTP Requests to Fetch Taiwan Stock Quotes via API
For Taiwan stocks, I use the API provided by Finmindtrade.
Unlike US stocks, the Taiwan stock API requires both the stock ticker and a specific date as input parameters. One important thing to watch out for: some ticker symbols start with leading zeros, like 006208 or 0050 (these are popular market-cap-weighted ETFs in Taiwan). When passing them as strings, you need to make sure those leading zeros are preserved. This needs to be set up properly in the spreadsheet beforehand.
Same as before — the closing price gets written back to the Price cell, and Value is Price multiplied by Quantity.
Using n8n HTTP Requests to Fetch Exchange Rates via API
Since the final total is calculated in TWD, all USD-denominated assets need to be converted to New Taiwan Dollars.
For this, I need to fetch the current exchange rate. The API I use is:
Calling this API directly returns the current USD exchange rates against all other currencies.
I simply pick out the TWD rate and write that number to a separate cell.
Adding Up All Assets
Finally, we can fill in all the cells in the spreadsheet.
Some cells require additional calculations — for example, the “US stocks in TWD” cell needs the USD total multiplied by the exchange rate. After all the calculations are done and every cell is filled in, you get your total net worth.
And that’s your net worth for the day!
You might notice a “Wait” node in the middle — that’s a 30-second pause. The workflow makes multiple Google Sheets operations from left to right, and too many requests in quick succession would cause errors. Adding a brief pause in between solved this rate-limiting issue.
Getting Notifications on Telegram via n8n
I have the workflow scheduled to run every day at 7:00 AM. At that hour, the US market has just closed and the Taiwan market hasn’t opened yet — it’s a relatively stable moment for asset valuations. The notification tells me the day’s Fear & Greed Index score along with the status of all my assets.
As for how to set up Telegram notifications in n8n — there are plenty of tutorials online about this. The key steps are creating a Telegram bot and obtaining the chat ID.
Development Cost and Benefits of This Solution
Cost: About 4 Hours
The main challenges during development and setup were:
- Configuring the APIs for fetching US and Taiwan stock prices
- Writing the calculation formulas
- Setting up the Telegram bot notifications
Even so, the entire setup took no more than four hours.
Benefit: Knowing Your Total Assets Every Morning and Spotting Changes Instantly
From a purely technical standpoint, since this number is now available every day — and it used to take an hour each time I calculated it manually — I’m effectively saving an hour every single day. Because of all this saved time and the fact that the computer runs it automatically on schedule, the data density becomes incredibly high.
A number I used to see once a month, I can now see every single day — along with exactly how it changed.
When You Trade: How to Adjust the Numbers?
When you buy or sell stocks, the cash balance and share quantities obviously change.
Since these trades happen through the brokerage’s app, they aren’t automatically synced with this system yet. In 2025, whenever I made a trade, I still had to manually go back to Google Sheets to update the numbers. Each adjustment takes about 3 minutes. Compared to the old process, it’s still a massive time saver — and absolutely worth doing.
In 2026, I upgraded the process: I now send a screenshot of the trade confirmation to Telegram. Telegram passes it to n8n, which then calls an AI tool for image recognition. The AI extracts the trade details and sends them back to n8n, which automatically updates Google Sheets.
Many challenges that were previously unsolvable can now be handled with the help of AI tools.
All you need is proper token budget planning and the right AI tool integrations configured.
The Core of n8n: Letting Computers Handle Your Routine Work
For me, the most important thing about n8n is the process of building these systems.
We take our everyday workflows, break them down into understandable, step-by-step execution details, and then hand off the repetitive, mechanical parts to the computer.
The prerequisite is:
- These workflows already existed before n8n came along
- These workflows are mechanical and can be decomposed into discrete steps
n8n — and all AI tools for that matter — are not magic money trees. They can only improve upon what we already have in place.
