My Attributed Balance Sheet
As an accountant by training and qualification, I am prone to reckon everything in numbers. But my personal Balance Sheet of Assets and Liabilities if drawn in conventional units of Rupee would look pathetic and dismal. I therefore thought of drawing my Balance Sheet in attributable terms. No other time than now when the year 2024 is coming to an end and I have completed my existential and uneventful life of 86 years appears apt for this exercise
For those uninitiated in accountancy, the Balance Sheet is an enigma, showing, curiously, the same totals both of one’s Assets as well as Liabilities. After all, one is expected to have more assets than liabilities to reflect one’s financial position. In fact, there are reported cases of persons asking their investment advisors how their thousands of savings in investments have resulted in equal amounts of liabilities and no profit!
To escape from this problem, I have drawn my personal balance sheet using some common attributes. Under this approach there is no question of proving the positive and negative attributes arithmetically.
Let me here answer another question which many
people including several students in accountancy classes ask as to why the
Liabilities are shown on the left-hand side and the Assets on the right-hand
side in a Balance Sheet much to the embarrassment of the Professors... However, a clever Professor took recourse to
linking the ancient custom in Hindu rituals like marriages where the wife stood
on the right-hand side of the husband, which to any one facing them, is the husband’s
left-hand side and concluding nothing else can be a better example of a liability
for a male than his wife!!
Here is how my Attributed Balance
Sheet would look.
My Balance Sheet on Completion of 86 years
Capital & Liabilities
A. Capital
Family upbringing and Values
Education
Organizational ethos & work experience
B. Liabilities
Long term: Unmet life/career
ambitions
Short term: Prejudices /biases
Assets
A. Fixed Assets
Blessings of parents, gurus and the Almighty God
Family Harmony
Goodwill of
relations and friends
B. Current Assets
Professional recognition
Social & Community Relations
