What he was trying to do when he began the site in May 2008, he says, was start a conversation. Since March 2009, Mill has worked for the Sunlight Foundation, a Washington-based nonprofit group that tries to make government workings more transparent. His site turns that notion on himself. “The taboo around talking about money is ill-founded,” he says. “When you’re the only person dealing with it, you’re subject to all of the dysfunctions we all have. If we could all be a little less uptight and more communicative and social about it, we’d be getting better advice, and it wouldn’t be the sort of thing that we stress about privately.”

So Mill’s money is laid bare for the world to see. In the fall of 2008, he became a freelance Web developer. The timing could not have been worse. “I had $3,000 and no firm gigs,” he says, adding that at one point a potential client, after telling him that he had seen Mill’s negative net worth online, tried to lowball him on a job, letting him know that he assumed that Mill probably needed the money. “During that time, my emotional well-being was completely tied to the number in my savings account.”

It wasn’t a happy time, but during this period, Mill figured out how to feel comfortable handling his money. Mill now saves a quarter to half of his take-home pay in a savings account in an online bank, but he is not making as many extra payments as he could on the $20,000 or so in student loans he is carrying, nor does he have any money set aside for retirement. “I put a much higher value on flexibility,” he says. “And I feel like the better investment right now is in me. It’s much more important that I have as much freedom and liquidity as I can.”

Net worth is not precisely calibrated with financial freedom. If Mill used all of his savings to pay down some debt, his net-worth figure would remain the same, but he would have no emergency fund if he lost his job. For this reason, he has come to think of the figure as a number that doesn’t really tell his whole story.

Some financial advisers agree. “To me, it’s an irrelevant number,” says Spencer Sherman, author of “The Cure for Money Madness” and a founder and the chief executive of Abacus Wealth Partners. “If people have a billion in net worth and are spending half a billion in a year, they’re really poor.” After all, they’re on pace to be broke in 24 months. (Sherman’s preferred measure of financial health for retirees is a ratio that compares net worth, excluding home equity, with the amount of money people take from their portfolios each year. He generally doesn’t want clients spending more than 4 to 6 percent of their holdings annually.) Mill acknowledges that his philosophy of financial openness has its limits. “This would be hard for me to do if I was totally affluent,” Mill told me. He balked at revealing his salary for this article, even though some of his friends already know what it is. “I don’t want to cause any tension with my co-workers,” he says, allowing only that the figure was at the upper end of the midfive figures.

I talked to one NetworthIQ user, a South Florida woman, who has about $856,000 in net worth. She blogs about her financial life at adventures-of-sam.blogspot.com, but says she would never reveal her name on the site. She worries that doing so would inject tension into her offline life. Her friends might think she was bragging about her frugal habits or implicitly criticizing their spending. Indeed, talking about wealth or good fortune can seem coarse or boastful, and maybe some people don’t want poor relatives to know to what extent they could be helping — and aren’t.