Listing what you own and owe
The most common way an inventory misleads is by treating a blank as a nought. Here is how to build one that keeps its gaps visible — and why there is no exchange rate anywhere in ours.
Unknown is not zero, and the difference shows up in the total
The single most common way an inventory misleads is by treating a blank as a nought. Jewellery you never had valued becomes worth nothing; a credit balance you have not checked becomes a debt of zero. Both are wrong, and neither leaves a trace in the total.
So a blank in our inventory is recorded as unknown, kept out of every subtotal, counted next to the total (“2 items left unvalued”), and listed by name at the bottom. A zero you actually typed is a real figure and is treated as one. The two are never the same thing.
Currencies are kept apart, permanently
If you hold something in pesos and something in dollars, you get two sets of subtotals and no combined figure. There is no exchange rate in this tool. Adding one would mean either fetching live rates — which would mean sending a request from a page that promises to send nothing — or shipping a stale table that quietly ages into being wrong. A made-up total sitting next to real ones is worse than no total.
Amounts are read in whichever convention you use. 1,500 and 1.500 both come to fifteen hundred, 1,50 comes to one and a half, and every field shows you the reading it took, so a wrong guess is visible rather than silent. You can also pick the format the results are printed in.
Exact arithmetic, because the printed total has to match the column
Money in this tool is held as an exact decimal rather than as a floating-point number. It is not a theoretical concern: in ordinary binary arithmetic 0.1 + 0.2 is not 0.3, and a hundred entries of 0.10 do not come to 10.00. On a page whose whole job is a column of figures with a total underneath it, the total has to be the sum of the column.
“Joint” is a word you typed, not an instruction to halve
Ownership is recorded as a description in your own words, and nothing is derived from it. Writing “joint with my brother” does not cause anything to be divided by two, because how jointly held property passes depends on the form of ownership and the law that applies, and in some arrangements it does not form part of an estate at all. If you want to record what you consider your share, there is a separate attributed-value column for exactly that — your figure, clearly labelled as yours, never derived from the whole-item value.
A linked debt is deducted once
You can link a mortgage to the property it is secured on. That link is context for whoever reads the list; it is not a second deduction. The debt appears once in the debt subtotal, exactly like every other debt, and the listed balance is unchanged by linking it.
What this list is not
It is not the value of your estate for probate, for settlement, or for tax anywhere. What is counted, what is exempt, what is valued differently and what passes outside the estate altogether are all questions for someone qualified where you live. As the ABA’s introduction puts it, whether property is part of a probate estate has nothing to do with whether it is part of a taxable one. This tool offers a list, with subtotals, and stops.
Where the general points here come from
These sources support the narrow distinctions below and nothing further. None of them is a statement about your situation, and none of them makes this page legal advice.
- American Bar Association — Introduction to Wills
Supports: That property passing by beneficiary designation or by titling falls outside the probate estate, and that being in the probate estate is a separate question from being in the taxable estate.
Scope: US-oriented; the general distinction between a probate estate and a taxable estate exists in many systems under other names, but the rules do not transfer.
Checked: 5 September 2026