The moment a couple becomes engaged is usually one of the most emotional and special times of all, it can be compared to events such as getting married or having a child. Of course that if you want to make this moment as extraordinary as possible for your future bride, you know that the engagement ring plays the central role in this movie.
There are many different ways to obtain finance for the perfect ring. I assume that if you are reading this article, you are nowhere near rich. So exorbitant expenditures and millionaire bank accounts are out of the question. The average price for such gift ranges from $125 to $5000, depending of course on the carats, the choice on metal, the kind and quality of the stones, etc. This article focuses on finance possibilities for the ideal ring.
Save, My Friend, Save
You must be thinking this is some kind of joke. But it is not. Getting married is not a light decision. Not many people get married overnight. Most marriage proposals are planned with months of anticipation. So if you can plan a proposal, why not plan a monthly budget to save for the ring? It is nowhere near as difficult as it sounds. Only by cutting down on unnecessary expenditures and by saving at least 10% of your income, you will have a decent amount of money in a few months time. Here is an example, if you earn $3000 a month, and you decide to put aside let us say 15% of your salary, then in a six month period you will have saved $2700. Excellent!
Plastic Money To The Rescue!
Many soon-to-be grooms choose to pay for their fiancé’s rings with their credit cards. Even if you have to pay interest rates on your purchase, paying it back over six months seems a lot less painful than reimbursing 4 grand at once.
Store Finance Plans
Many jewellery stores have special repayment programs for customers. You should perform further research and find the store which offers the best finance program.
Private Funding
You would have saved had you thought of it. Your credit cards are maxed out and getting a new one is totally out of the questions. Research on jewellery stores? No time for that. So what is there to do? Do not panic, applying for a secured or an unsecured loan can be the solution to your dilemma. Not only will you obtain the exact amount of money you need, but you can repay it over a long period of time (months or even years). Bear in mind that the interest rate depends on the loan type, usually unsecured loans carry higher interest rates than secured loans.
Ask Your Grandma
Family heirlooms are often passed on from mother to son, and they carry a lot of meaning and family history. It will surely be more significant for your bride-to-be to receive your mother’s engagement ring, than one bought at a store. Make sure to ask your mother-in-law regarding this issue as well.
As you can see, there are many different ways to obtain finance for an engagement ring, some of them are quite obvious, others are more creative. You just have to find the one that best suits your needs.
By: Hilary Bowman
Posts Tagged ‘Monthly Budget’
Engagement Ring Purchase – Finance Tips
January 24th, 2010Personal Finance Budgeting
December 23rd, 2009
Personal finance budgeting is on of the key ingredients to building wealth. It allows you to quickly pay down debt, save for college, regularly invest so you can enjoy an early retirement, and live a stress free. When you budget appropriately, you can comfortably go about your life knowing exactly how much money you have coming in and how much you can afford to spend.
Personal finance budgeting sounds like a boring thing to do, and most people do not like working with numbers, but it’s really easy. I spend maybe 10 minutes a week, sometimes every other week, to budget, and I do it the hard way. I simply created an Excel spreadsheet that is organized by categories: housing, cash withdrawals, food, reoccurring expenses, gas and other. Once a week, or every other week, I log in to my bank account and credit card accounts and copy my expenses in the appropriate column. The spreadsheet automatically totals my expenses up and subtracts that from my monthly budget. So all I have to do is plug in my expense and the spreadsheet tells me how much money I have left.
Like I said earlier, this is the hard way. There personal finance budgeting programs that will actually do all of this work for you, and some of them are free. You simply register for a new account online, enter your banking and credit card information, and the online program will automatically download all of your transactions, sort them into appropriate categories, and produce many visual graphs to help you understand where your money is going. These programs will send you email or text notifications to let you know when you are nearing your budget, and will even produce recommendations for you on how to reduce your expenses by suggesting where to save and showing you how you stack up to the average consumer.
The programs are very secure as well. Most use the same technology that online banks use, and they don’t actually allow you to make any financial transactions from within the system. That means that even if someone where to hack into your account, all they would see is what you are spending your money on. An account number cannot be found anywhere within these systems, so they are safe and secure.
Budgeting doesn’t have to be difficult at all. When you automate he process, budgeting doesn’t require you to crunch any numbers or balancing checkbooks. Thanks to online banking, it’s as simple as setting up an account and letting the software do the budgeting for you. Now you can get your personal finance on track and pay down your debt and accumulate more wealth with hardly any effort at all.
By: Ryan J. Taylor
Home Finance Software – Taking Control of Your Finances
October 18th, 2009
Personal finance software is also known as home finance software. This is because it is simply personal finance software that you use in your home. You can use different applications under the category for different purposes.
Some of the applications cater to money management and accounting, whereas others concentrate on expense, income, and investment tracking. You can also use some of the applications for calculating mortgage payments, loan rescheduling, and loan prepayments. This you can do because the applications are equipped with a built-in mortgage calculator.
You can also use home finance software applications for budgeting purposes. They can help you prepare the monthly budget based on calculations involving the family’s income and the expected monthly expenses. The software will churn out a budget report at the click of a mouse. The important advantage of budgeting using home finance software is that you do not need to manually track your monthly budget.
Home finance applications maintain accurate account balances. However, for this you need to enter all purchases, credits, and payments in the application’s database through the checking account built into the application’s user interface. You are spared the hassle of making calculations as the application does this for you.
This is why reconciling of your personal finance accounts becomes easy with the burden of doing the math without making any errors whatsoever is taken over by the software. This keeps your mind relaxed and then you are able to concentrate on other important tasks that require your immediate attention.
Tax tracking becomes easier if you are in the habit of using home finance software. This is because tax categories are part of the software. Even if some of the tax categories are not included, all you have to do is to set them up. Such categorization of tax transactions helps you in saving time when the time comes for filing your annual tax returns. A decision on whether you need to make adjustment of tax with holdings can be done throughout the whole year through such categorization.
Some of the sophisticated home finance software packages allow you the facility of downloading data and transactions from banks. This helps integrate your checking account with those maintained by your bank. This convenient feature also helps you avoid manual data entry to a significant extent and thereby saves time.
Online bill payments become very much possible through most home finance applications. Although you may have to pay a nominal fee to access the service, it is still worth the convenience.
Another advantage of using personal finance applications in homes is that you can track all your investment transactions through online updates. This helps keep your investment account balances always updated.
All in all home finance software is a boon to families. The greatest advantage of using it is the sense of mental relaxation that you get by being fully dependent on it to make your finances become systematic.
By: Dean Forster
