Beyond Expenses: The Write-Off
How do you react when you're faced with an unexpected expense, at the last minute? Is it panic, frustration, or resignation? For most of us, it's all three. It was for me on the day of my trip to the UAE with my friends, when we found out, at the last minute, that we'd have to pay an 14,000 INR to carry our check-in luggages!
This was more than our ticket to Abu Dhabi itself and it would put a serious dent in all of our travel budgets. It would mean we'd have to think twice before spending a dirham, thrice before booking any activity, and it seemed like our trip was off to a very rocky start. No surprise it put a big dent on all our moods that day.
We decided to pack as light as possible and deal with the extra check-in costs at the airport. It was a good decision because the gentleman at the kiosk offered to check-in all our luggages for free and took the load off our backs at no cost!
During this kerfuffle, my mom and my fiancé saw the very irritated side of me, not new but not pleasant. I did not like that my mood, my problems, my frustrations had a bearing on them. Besides, how could I let a mistake spoil the mood, for myself, my closest people, and most of all, start the trip on a low? The travel gods were having some fun by testing my resolve I guess.
Once we got done with all this non-sense, we had some time to kill at the airport. We headed to the lounge, got us a couple of drinks, and we took a minute to ourselves. It is at this time I remember something my cousin told me years ago. It's a simple one line story that has come to change my world view half a decade later.
Back in 2018, I was building my startup and reconnecting with my long lost cousins. With one such cousin and in a random conversation, I ask him how much it costs him to keep his website and blog live. He tells me the dollar figure and continues to tell me something that didn't mean much to me at that time, but somehow stuck around in the back of my mind all these years: "I write it off". He said that he is able to write-off this cost because he charges a client for hosting a Wordpress site.
Fast forward to October 2024, as I relax at the airport lounge, the write-off story hits me again and it made all the sense. I was finally able to understand what a write-off is. It's a better way to think about expenses, especially unexpected ones, as an adult and with an alternate source of income.
This is not clever accounting or avoiding expenses. It's about approaching expenses with a different mindset. Every cost has potential to be offset, redirected, or transformed - if you're willing to think differently about it.
My cousin showed me this years ago. I just wasn't ready to understand it then.
Loosing your patience, anger, frustration, irritation, panic, resignation, etc are all poor reactions, reactions of the unprepared. There's reason why we feel these, but there's a better way to deal with situations that not only keep our spirits high and financially un-broke. It is the write-off.