What does ‘cut your losses’ mean? Find out here and start using it when you speak English!
Hi, I’m Joel. In this video,
I’m going to talk about the idiom “to cut one’s losses,”
or “to cut your losses.”
So, what does this mean?
Well, so let’s say that you are playing poker or you are gambling, some kind of card game or something.
And you’ve already put a lot of money in and you think you’re going to lose.
So, you have two options: one, you can continue putting in more money,
which will give you a chance to win, but it will also increase the amount of money you’re going to lose,
if you indeed lose the game or whatever.
And the other option is “to cut your losses,”
which means that you decide to accept that you have already lost something
and you want to prevent future loss. So I might say, “I’ve already lost $100,
I don’t want to lose anymore, I’m going to cut my losses.”
So, in that case you accept to lose the money because you don’t want to risk losing anymore.
This could also happen in business very easily.
Let’s say you’re starting a new company and you invest a million dollars in this company,
and after a couple years you see that the company is failing, it’s not profitable.
So once again, you could choose to invest more money into the business
and hope that it will become profitable and you will recover your money, or you can “cut your losses” and say,
“I’m going to accept that I lost my investment. I don’t want to lose any more money.
I’m not going to give more money, because I believe I will probably lose that money as well.”
So, you can use this for investments, for gambling, things like that.
All right, so, I hope that this was helpful for you and that now you understand and can
use the idiom “to cut your losses.”
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