alt Hacker News> For example, how do you book depreciation of a motor vehicle?
For a car it is particularly easy, look up its value in one of the standard sources like blue book.
What you seem to be saying is that you don't really care to track your current net worth. Which is totally sensible if you don't care about that.
But if you wanted to track net worth, then you'd need to track the actual value of everything you own, which includes adjusting the value of depreciating (and appreciating) assets regularly.
This is the kind of thinking that leads to stupid stuff like "a vehicle loses 1/3 its value when you drive it off the forecourt".
It doesn't, obviously, unless maybe one of the seats falls out or something.
Looking up the potential market value of your car regularly is exactly the kind of ridiculous thing regular people don't need to do. Just put it in your assets as "1 car" and don't think about it again. Most people aren't going to be liquidating all their assets and moving half way across the world, and even if you are you don't need to do this.