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How to track assets no app can sync: Korean gold, jeonse deposits, private holdings
Automatic aggregators skip physical gold, jeonse deposits, and private holdings. Here is how to keep them in your net worth instead of pretending they are not there.
Most net worth apps are built on one assumption: every asset lives at an institution with an API. Bank accounts, US brokerages, the big crypto exchanges. You connect the login, the balance syncs, the chart updates. It works well right up until you own something that has no login to connect.
Physical gold bought at a Korean bank. A jeonse deposit held by a landlord. A stake in a private company. A rental valued off a local comparable, not a data feed. None of these sync. Aggregators like Empower, Monarch, or Copilot quietly leave them out, and your net worth reads lower than it actually is.
The short answer: track them by hand in a tool that treats a manual entry as a real asset, not a throwaway note, and folds its value into your totals and your analysis the same way a synced holding flows in.
Why sync-first apps miss these
Automatic aggregation works by talking to an aggregator (Plaid, Yodlee, a crypto API) that already has a connection to the institution. No institution, no connection, no line item. That leaves out three common categories:
- Physical assets. Gold bars, a paid-off apartment, art, a car. There is no server holding a live balance for these.
- Region-specific instruments. A Korean jeonse deposit is a large refundable sum with no US analog, so no US aggregator models it. Same story for many non-US pension and savings products.
- Private and illiquid holdings. Pre-IPO equity, a stake in a friend's company, a private fund. The value moves on events, not on a ticker.
For a lot of people these are not rounding errors. A jeonse deposit or a paid-off home can be the single largest thing they own. An app that cannot see it is not tracking their net worth. It is tracking the convenient part of it.
The manual-first approach
The fix is not clever, it is just deliberate. You enter these assets by hand and update them when their value actually changes, which for most of them is rarely. The important part is the tool treating that hand-entered value as first-class:
- It counts toward net worth, allocation, and concentration, not a separate "other" bucket that the charts ignore.
- It is stored in one currency internally so a KRW deposit and a USD brokerage account can be compared on the same axis.
- It survives. You set the value once, and it stays until you change it, rather than resetting to zero because a sync failed.
| Asset type | Syncs automatically? | How to keep it current |
|---|---|---|
| Bank / US brokerage | Yes | Automatic |
| Major crypto exchange | Usually | Automatic or a manual price |
| Physical gold, art, car | No | Enter value, update on revaluation |
| Jeonse deposit | No | Enter once, update at renewal |
| Rental property | No | Enter a comparable, revise yearly |
| Private / pre-IPO equity | No | Enter at last round, update on events |
The cost of the manual approach is a few minutes now and again. The cost of the sync-only approach is a net worth number that is quietly wrong in the same direction every time.
What "tracking" should actually do
Recording a value is the easy part. The reason to bother is what happens after. Once every asset is in one place, in one currency, real questions become answerable:
- How concentrated am I, counting the apartment and the deposit, not just the stocks?
- What share of my wealth can I actually reach in a month if I need it?
- Is my net worth trend coming from saving, or from the market moving positions I already held?
None of these can be answered from the synced slice alone, because the synced slice is not the whole balance sheet.
Where Opula fits
Opula is a connector you add to Claude or ChatGPT. Once connected, you tell it what you own in plain language, including the assets nothing else can see, and it stores each one in a per-user database, converted to a common currency at the entry date.
Physical gold, a jeonse deposit, a private holding: you set the value, and it sits in your net worth and your allocation next to your synced positions. From there Opula runs the structural reads on the whole picture, liquidity, leverage, concentration, net worth trend, rather than on the convenient part of it. It is a diagnostic tool, so it reports what is true about your balance sheet, it does not tell you what to buy.
The point is not that manual entry is fun. It is that the assets an app cannot sync are often the ones that matter most, and leaving them out to keep the chart tidy is the wrong trade.