Track Gold Investments, Currency and Crypto in One Place

To track gold investments, foreign currency and crypto in one place, keep a single list where every purchase and sale has a date, a quantity and the price you actually paid or received. That record shows what your holdings are roughly worth today, your average cost, and how much of your gain is real money versus paper profit.

You only need three facts per purchase: what you bought, when, and for how much. From those you can calculate your average cost, compare it with today’s price and separate realized gains from unrealized ones when you sell. Below we walk through the method with a simple gold coin example.

Why track gold investments, cash and crypto in one place

Many households hold their savings in scattered pieces: a few gold coins or a small bar in a safe, inherited jewelry, foreign cash left over from a trip, a currency account, a crypto app on a phone, maybe a fund in a brokerage account. When each sits somewhere different, three problems appear:

• You never know the total. “What are our savings worth?” turns into a guess every time.
• You forget the cost. If you can’t remember what you paid three years ago, you can’t tell whether today’s value is a gain or a loss.
• Knowledge sits with one person. Only one family member knows where everything is; if they’re unavailable, the savings are practically invisible.

A single list solves all three. It is also the asset half of a simple net worth tracker: add up what you own, subtract what you owe, and you have the full picture. For the income-and-spending side, see our guide on how to make a family budget.

How to track gold investments: what to record

Give every purchase its own line with these details:

1. Asset type: gold by the gram or troy ounce, gold coins, 22k or 18k jewelry, silver, a foreign currency, a cryptocurrency or a fund.
2. Quantity: pieces (coins, bills), grams (jewelry, small bars), ounces, or units (crypto, fund shares).
3. Date: the day you bought it. If you don’t know the exact date, the month and year are enough.
4. Unit price and total paid: what you actually paid the dealer, bank or exchange, premiums and fees included.
5. Where it is: at home, in a bank, or on which platform. This matters a lot for the rest of the family.

When you sell, record the date, quantity and sale price the same way. Logging a sale, rather than simply deleting the holding, keeps your average cost and realized gains accurate.

What is average cost and how do you calculate it?

Average cost is the per-unit cost you get by dividing the total amount you paid for an asset by the total quantity you hold, after buying it at different prices over time. The formula is simple: average cost = total paid ÷ total quantity. It is also called weighted average cost, because a large purchase moves the average more than a small one. The total you paid is often called your cost basis.

Say a family bought small gold coins on three occasions (the numbers are for illustration only):

The average cost calculation here: $4,400 ÷ 10 coins = $440. Note that a simple average of the three prices, ($400 + $440 + $500) ÷ 3 = $446.67, would be wrong, because each purchase was a different size. Always divide the total paid by the total quantity.

Realized vs. unrealized gains

The difference between what your holdings are worth today and what they cost is an unrealized gain or loss. It exists only on paper and moves with the price. When you sell, the difference between the sale proceeds and the cost of what you sold becomes a realized gain or loss, and it no longer changes.

Continuing the example, suppose each coin is now worth $520. Ten coins are worth $5,200 against a cost of $4,400: an unrealized gain of $800, or about 18%. That money is yours only if you sell; if the price drops tomorrow, it shrinks.

Partial sales: what happens to your average cost

Selling part of a holding is common: a down payment, a large bill, an emergency. Under the weighted average method, a partial sale doesn’t change the average cost of what remains; it only reduces the quantity and the total cost proportionally.

The family sells 4 of its 10 coins at $520 each:

• Sale proceeds: 4 × $520 = $2,080
• Cost of the coins sold: 4 × $440 = $1,760
• Realized gain: $2,080 − $1,760 = $320
• What remains: 6 coins, average cost still $440, total cost $2,640
• Unrealized gain on the rest: 6 × $520 − $2,640 = $480

The realized $320 plus the unrealized $480 equals the $800 gain before the sale. If your numbers are consistent, that equation always holds, which makes it a handy check on your own spreadsheet. Tax systems may use other methods, such as first-in, first-out, to calculate taxable gains, so check local rules or ask a tax professional before filing. And in real life, your sale price is what the dealer pays you, which brings us to the next point.

Spot price vs. dealer price: why gold values differ

Gold’s international price is quoted per troy ounce, about 31.1 grams. Divide the spot price by that weight and you get the price of one gram of pure, or fine, gold. Jewelry and many coins aren’t pure, so their purity is stated in karats: 22k is about 91.6% gold, 18k is 75% and 14k is 58.5%. If your family holds Turkish gold coins (çeyrek, yarım, tam), the same logic applies: a çeyrek weighs about 1.75 grams at 22k, which is roughly 1.6 grams of fine gold.

The price a dealer quotes you differs from that fine-gold value for a few reasons:

• Buy-sell spread: dealers sell above and buy below the market price. The gap is what you’d lose buying and selling on the same day.
• Premium over spot: coins and small bars usually cost more than their gold content because of minting, distribution and dealer margin.
• Fabrication: with jewelry, the cost of making the piece is built into the price and is usually not paid back when you sell.

So the current value in any tracker is an estimate, not a guaranteed amount. The exact figure is whatever a dealer will pay on the day you sell.

Recording gifted or inherited gold and jewelry

Wedding jewelry, gifted coins and inherited pieces are often a family’s largest store of value, yet they’re rarely written down. A simple routine:

1. Count by type: list coins, bars and jewelry separately.
2. Weigh the jewelry: note the grams and karat of each piece; if there’s no hallmark, have a jeweler weigh and test it.
3. Pick a date and value: a gift has no purchase price. For your own tracking, recording its approximate value on the day you received it answers “how much has it changed since?” Tax rules for gifted and inherited assets differ by country, so ask a professional before you sell.
4. Keep personal notes elsewhere: who gave what belongs in a separate list; the asset record only needs quantity and value.

Real value: your gains after inflation

A rising dollar value isn’t always a real gain. Nominal return shows only the price change; real return accounts for general price increases over the same period and measures what happened to your purchasing power. A rough formula: (1 + nominal return) ÷ (1 + inflation) − 1.

For example, if your holdings rose 4% in a year while prices in general rose 6%: 1.04 ÷ 1.06 − 1 ≈ −1.9%. The number went up, but your purchasing power fell by about 1.9%. For your own math, use the latest consumer price data from your national statistics office, such as the BLS in the US or the ONS in the UK. This calculation doesn’t say one asset is better than another; it only shows where your savings really stand. For the spending side of high-inflation periods, read our guide to budgeting during inflation.

Common mistakes when you track savings and assets

• Recording purchases but not sales, which breaks both the quantity and the average cost.
• Lumping different purities together; a gram of 22k jewelry isn’t worth the same as a gram of 14k.
• Taking a simple average of purchase prices.
• Valuing holdings at the dealer’s selling price and overestimating what you have.
• Leaving crypto and foreign cash in their own currencies and never seeing the total in one currency.

To grow what you track, see our guides on ways to save money and building an emergency fund.

Tracking your assets in Hano’s My assets section

A spreadsheet can hold everything above, but updating prices every day and handling sales correctly gets tiring. Hano is a family budget app, and its My assets section works as a gold tracker app and a simple portfolio tracker app in one. It is available on every plan, including Free.

• What you can track: gold by the gram or troy ounce, Turkish gold coins (çeyrek, yarım, tam, Ata), 22k, 18k and 14k jewelry, silver, foreign currencies, 20 cryptocurrencies including Bitcoin and Ethereum, plus stocks and funds.
• Prices that update themselves: gold, silver, currency and crypto prices refresh automatically every hour. For stocks and funds, you enter the price.
• Automatic math: log purchases and sales with their dates and prices, and Hano works out average cost, current value, gain or loss and realized gains for you.
• Log by typing (Pro and Max): write a sentence such as “bought 10 grams of gold for 1,200” to the assistant and confirm the suggested entry.

Two things to be clear about. Hano doesn’t buy or sell anything and gives no investment advice; it only keeps records. Gold values are approximate fine-gold values calculated from the ounce price, so a dealer’s buy or sell price may differ. If you want your assets and your spending in the same app, download Hano for free and compare plans in the pricing section.

This guide is general information, not personal financial advice.