The Fifth C
Aahhh the elusive “Fifth C”, the cost. There are all kinds of rules of thumb and old wives tales about how much you’re meant to spend on an engagement ring. And they’re all ridiculous. One months salary? Two months salary? 6 months rent? The eternal enslavement of your first born? Hopefully by this point you know the girl well enough to know what she’d be happy to spend, because it’s very nearly about to become “our money” that you are spending… if it’s not that way already.
I took what I think was a slightly more sensible approach and one that is dictated more by personal circumstance than the price of property in London in any given year. Given I’m only ever going to buy one of these, it made sense that it should be a not insignificant amount of money. I also figured is was a symbolic investment in “us”, so it should be worth more than the laptop/phone/camera/etc that I’m likely to replace every couple of years. But on the other side, it shouldn’t sink us in debt. In fact, I was strongly opposed to taking out any loan to buy the ring (that includes putting it on a payment plan). It also couldn’t be so much that we’d be short of cash for living on a weekly basis. I wanted it to remain a suprise to Emma so that meant I couldn’t be emptying our savings account, and I didn’t want to be lying to her about why we had no money. Any impact on our day to day lives and savings had to be minimal. That either means cutting out the pub with the boys a couple of nights a month and generally curbing as many extra-curricular activities as possible without raising suspicions, or some creative accounting.
