- Joined
- Jan 2, 2018
- Messages
- 1,178
@Eli22 thank you for the thoughts on this! We were already trying to imagine how this will feel in a few years with the different potential outcomes so your comment really resonated with me. What if there's a tech crash and our incomes fall through the floor in 6 months? What if my career grows from this first job so the price difference feels completely irrelevant and I wish I had just gotten what I wanted from the beginning? Maybe we should be looking at even higher budgets!
Haha you can always up your budget, but if you are happy with the lovely stone you’ve already found, why spend more? There will always be other pieces to acquire later on as your spending power increases.
I think my husband spent around $20k on my ER years ago (I was not really “into” jewelry then, we did not discuss the ring or a budget at all, he just surprised me) and now he’s spent many multiples of that amount on pieces for me in the past few yrs. Time is the big equalizer when it comes to finances, and you still have a lot of it in the whole scheme of things. You can weather the ups and downs in the economy (we got through the early 2000s, 2008, 2020…). When I was in grad school over 20 years ago, I think I was earning around $10-15k for my assistantship? So getting my first “real job” was quite the bump up, and as you said, it’s likely to go up from there.
I’ve honestly have never regretted stretching a bit/taking calculated risks to get what I truly want, but I have regretted settling for “good enough.” I usually end up obsessing over and acquiring what I wanted in the first place. The same goes for food substitutions- I’ve learned I should just eat some of what I’m craving because I’ll end up eating the “healthier alternative(s)” PLUS the craved item
I’m sure whatever decision you make will result in a lovely ring (and union) that you will cherish for a very long time