We're going to move on to Jake's question. Jake asks, 'Would you love to hear the Money Guy's view on budgeting for a wedding ring and where do I save this?' For context, he's on Step Seven of the
Financial Order of Operations.
This one gives me a little heartburn, but yeah, I know we've done we get some negative flack. Well, now let me tell you, look, there's a whole industry. I'm just gonna say somebody posted a short where it said the fifteen-thousand-dollar synthetic diamond I bought you can now buy for 600 or something. I know synthetic diamonds are different than the real things that is pulling out of the ground, but it is one of those things where the market would have you. I think they tell everybody was it two months of income? That's what I've heard. I've heard two months to as much as four months of your like salary, which is a lot.
I love that because, I mean, that might get you in a bad financial situation, especially if you're running up a bunch of credit card debt and other things. You need to really pay attention to where you are in your journey. I'll tell you from young 20-something-year-old Brian, and Bo, you can give your experience share on this, too. I was trying to buy a ring that was nice enough that my wife would know that it was really showing my commitment to her, but it was also nice enough that if we were going to the place I thought we were going financially, that should be set, you know, that she'd be still proud of this ring, for sure.
Now, here's why this gives me heartburn. I am now getting closer to 50, and we live in this neighborhood, and there are all these ladies I look at, and I'm like, 'Whoa, is that synthetic, or is that really...?' That's real. Holy cow. A lot of love went in that ring because I think about it. I will tell you, it is my wife who's brought up, she's like, 'Maybe we do.' I was like, 'No, no. Remember, I bought this.' I have this whole narrative that I share on the show that I bought her a ring that was going to be good, no matter what station of life, so that's why I'm telling you this, guys. This is not stop this whole financial mutant mentality of doing things, so that's why my wife still has the ring from our original wedding, but she's starting to whisper, you know what? You know what? Because we don't do a lot of jewelry in my house. That's right.
I'd be curious to know what you think about wedding rings. Yeah, so here's what I think is interesting. We have a deliverable, maybe you can even pull this one up. We call it our
Wealth Multiplier that shows how powerful your dollars can be, especially for young folks. Brian has a koozie he loves to drink out of that says 'one dollar beer'. You caught me while I was drinking out of the wrong wrong thing. This one dollar beer cost me eight dollars because for a 20 year old, we know that one dollar has the capacity to turn into 88 by the time that you get to retirement. So when you think about this wedding ring, when you think about this thing that you're going to use to propose to your significant other, you ought to think about it in those terms. Like, okay, this is how much I'm gonna put this. So if this is like two months, three months, four months of salary, what can that turn into by the time that we get to retirement? Because by the way, I hope that before you get down on the knee and before you ask, before you ask the question 'will you spend the rest of your life?', and then you're thinking, 'man, I want to be with this person forever, I want to be in retirement with this person'. And if I think about in the future, the person I'm in retirement with and I do the math and how much this ring would have cost us in retirement dollars, will that have been a decision that we were happy about?
That had been a decision that we thought was a prudent decision together as a household. So I say that on the front end, right? Because I see some people, and man, they do it. They literally go buy a ring that's like five or six months of their salary, but of course, they have it saved up so they put it on a credit card and they're paying for it for the first three years. Yeah, buy insurance on that team. You got to insure it and it's just right, it's this crazy thing. Um, when my wife and I, we're girlfriend at the time, we're getting serious and it was looking like marriage was a thing that was potentially on the radar, I started kind of feeling out what would she like, right? Like we were like, we'd think, 'oh hey, we're at the mall, let's go look at this jewelry store'. Now, she probably saw through it. I thought I was slick. Uh, truthfully, I'm not very slick but I knew exactly what she wanted, knew what kind of stone she wanted, what kind of cuts she wanted, so there wasn't a lot of guessing. Well, me as the guy had to buy the ring, it made it much more real for me to say, 'hey, I don't want to go buy the big ring, the expensive ring, the fancy ring, the showy ring. I know exactly what she wants because she's been very clear. I like this thing and I like this one'. And so it allowed me when I thought about the ring, whether I paid a thousand dollars for it or ten thousand dollars for it, I imagine I was buying a ring that she was going to love because she and I had actually looked at them together and we kind of figured that out together. I think if you can go into it that way and you start saving for it because you don't want to buy this thing on debt, and you put the appropriate amount of time into building up for it, I think you can do something like Brian says, buy something that for current stage of life is great and appropriate fits but is also something that your significant other is going to love for the next 50, 60, 70, 80 years that you're married, and I think that's a beautiful, beautiful thing. Great way to close this show out. Just, I know I'm willing to confess, my ring that I bought my wife was one month's salary, okay? I just did it for what I made at the time. That's great. So, do you mind? What would you know? Or is that bad to share that? I think mine would have, mine probably came out to somewhere around between one to two months. I didn't make a lot of money back then, that's a problem.
I had been working for a while, so I had some savings also, right? So I was able to save up for it, and it was one of those things that weighed it because we...I think it was the key, like, you don't want to go into debt for it. That's right. You don't want to ruin your financial services. It was a month and probably a week. That's what I meant, yeah. Somewhere between one to two, that's mathematically somewhere between one to two months. I knew the answer, I was just trying to give him the chance to tell you guys.
