How to create an asset with a reduced value compared to my regular currency (dollars)

[adrian]

There may be technical accounting reasons to treat rebates as offsets to
expenses rather than income.  But my own reasons are simply that it's what
makes sense to me.  I don't really track income very carefully.  I mainly
track expenses. 

A rebate is a complex form of discount where the vendor is trying to limit
your ability to use the discount (one time only) and they are hoping you
won't remember to send it in.  If I went to the store and saw a computer on
sale as original price $1000, marked down to $900 I would never dream of
entering that as a $1000 purchase and a $100 income.  A rebate is
conceptually identical to me: it is a delayed discount on my purchase, and
in my head if there is a $100 rebate I'm thinking "this thing costs $900,"
not "this costs $1000 but the expense will be offset by my higher income
when I get the rebate".   So for that reason, it seems like the obvious
thing is to treat the rebate as an offset to the original expense.   

In the case at hand I spent $430 on the gift card and when I buy something
that costs $100, I'm really only spending $86.  That's what makes sense to
me for how this ought to be counted.   Since I don't know the category of
the expense in advance, I can't just put in a $70 offset unless I put it as
"misc", in which case I lose track of some information about how I allocated
my money.  

So does anybody have advice on how to solve my original problem?  







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