Month: September 2025

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• For Love & Money is a column from Business Insider answering your relationship and money questions.
• This week, a reader feels resentful that her husband won’t buy her the engagement ring he promised her 17 years ago.
• Our columnist advises that the reader’s request isn’t frivolous, and suggests a frank conversation with her husband.
• Have a question for our columnist? Write to For Love & Money using this Google form.

Dear For Love & Money,

Seventeen years ago, when my now-husband proposed to me, he gave me a small ring with a fake stone and cheap metal. We both agreed it was a placeholder; we were poor and decided that the security of our life together was more important than big diamonds. My wedding ring was just a plain gold band, so when the cheap engagement ring broke within the first two years of our marriage, I started wearing just the band, and have been ever since. However, we agreed on several occasions that for our 10th anniversary, he’d buy me my dream ring.

Our 10th anniversary came and went. I reminded my husband about the ring, but we had some significant expenses at the time, and ended up prioritizing an anniversary trip over gifts. I’ve tried to have a good attitude about this, but in recent years, it’s started to hurt my feelings. When we have a windfall or a special occasion, I’ll gently remind him that I’m still waiting on a ring, but he mostly ignores me, and we spend the money on other things.

Over the years, my dream ring has gone from a $10,000 diamond to a $1,500 moissanite, and he knows this because I often send him links. He doesn’t acknowledge any of it. We don’t have fights about it, but when I try to force the conversation, he acts like I’m being ridiculous and moves on to more “important” financial priorities.

The longer this goes on, the more resentful I become — but also, the sillier I feel. We’ve been married for 17 years. I’m in my 40s, we’re saving for our children’s college tuition, and I’m still stuck on a piece of jewelry. At this point, I think my insistence has less to do with the ring itself and more to do with my husband breaking a promise, ignoring my reminders, and refusing to give his wife something beautiful and expensive. How do I get through to him?

Sincerely,

(Not) Asking Too Much

Dear Not Asking Too Much,

You aren’t. It would seem you already know this, based on the sign-off you chose, but in case you’re caught up on the apparent frivolity of a forty-something woman demanding a bigger ring, allow me to underline it: You aren’t asking too much. In fact, I’d argue you’re asking for the bare minimum — that your husband keep his promise to you and put you first on your shared financial priority list now and then.

That said, I don’t plan to advise you on the best way to squeeze a ring from your husband’s tight fist. You could probably find a way to cajole him, give him scary ultimatums, or tickle his insecurities by pointing out the rings of his friends’ and rivals’ wives. But the problem is, no matter how you might try to manipulate the situation, none of those things will truly get through to him, and would likely cause more harm to your marriage than good.

That’s the rub. I don’t know this for certain, but it seems like you want your husband to want to buy you this emblem of devotion and commitment, based on the fact that you still send him links to the rings you like rather than just tapping the purchase button yourself and drawing from the shared bank accounts you presumably have access to.

I might be wrong — maybe you really just want a prettier ring, which is entirely fair. (I would hardly call waiting 17 years to get a single piece of jewelry materialistic.) If that’s the case, all you have to do is let your husband know that you’ve thought about it, decided this is your financial priority, set aside some money for it, and swipe your card.

But I think it’s more likely you want the ring to represent your husband’s love and adoration. Unfortunately, this means you simply don’t get to have your way unless your husband independently experiences a change of heart. You want your husband to feel something toward you that culminates in a ring, and while we can influence people’s actions and thoughts, we can’t force anyone to feel anything.

I’d suggest you start by sitting down and having a frank discussion with your husband, to share why this ring means so much to you, and find out why he doesn’t seem to care about it. While texting your husband links to rings is hardly subtle, the fact that you sometimes feel silly about even wanting a piece of jewelry so badly may be causing you to hedge in your conversations with him about it, offering him an easy out. You could even show him the letter you wrote me to demonstrate how important this is to you.

On the other hand, your husband may see an engagement ring this many years into your marriage as a frivolous expense and a particularly narrow financial goal, considering only one member of your family will benefit from it. And while you and I may see it as a just reward for 17 years of patience, he probably considers that same timeline as evidence that you don’t need one. After all, you’ve survived with a simple band for nearly two decades. In the face of all the financial bills, totaled cars, and home repair costs you two may have faced together over the years, he could just not recognize how important this really is to you.

If, after the conversation, your husband still can’t hear the need behind your want and continues to ignore you, or your conversation about it devolves into endless circles, I’d suggest you seek couples counseling about the matter. This may seem like a dramatic response, but it shows that this isn’t just about a ring; it’s about a promise, a value, and a symbol of your love — as well as being able to have respectful and empathetic communication. Of course, you want him to want to give that all to you.

Hopefully, once your husband recognizes that your desire for this ring goes deeper than a new bauble to show off to your friends, he will be happy to oblige. The key to communicating this to him is in recognizing it yourself — you aren’t asking too much. You’ve loved one another and honored that commitment for nearly two decades. That is worth showing off, if only to one another.

Rooting for you,

For Love & Money

Looking for advice on how your savings, debt, or another financial challenge is affecting your relationships? Write to For Love & Money using this Google form.

• Funds formerly off limits to ordinary investors are being introduced to 401(k)s.
• The private equity industry says these funds can help savers generate higher returns.
• The industry’s methods for reporting those returns, however, can be opaque and hard to follow.

When selecting the 401(k) investment options offered by your employer, you likely check the performance of a particular fund before you invest.

That process could soon be put to the test, as private equity and other alternative investment assets, once closed off from the average person, are introduced into more retirement savings plans.

A few plan sponsors (2.2% as of last year) have already experimented with offering alternative assets in their plans. President Trump’s August executive order is likely to push this number higher.

The industry’s pitch is that everyday people will get the chance to invest in an asset class that has minted dozens of billionaires by gaining exposure to the private market — a massive slice of the US economy that’s largely off limits to ordinary investors. Roughly 90% of American companies over $100 million are privately held.

Private market returns, however, are opaque and complex, which could present problems for regular people trying to vet them or compare them against benchmarks.

Here are some of the challenges savers may face when trying to assess the performance of funds once reserved for pensions and other large investors.

What even is IRR?

The private equity industry’s favorite way to portray performance is with the internal rate of return, or IRR. But IRR, which can easily hit 30% or higher in industry marketing materials, is not basic yield.

“A lot of people think the internal rate of return is like the yield on a government bond,” said Jeffrey Hooke, a former industry insider who led investments for a $30 billion private sector division of the World Bank and is now an adjunct instructor at Johns Hopkins.

Instead, it’s a formula that rewards certain behaviors, like selling good companies or paying dividends early in a fund’s history, said Hooke.

IRR is easy to “game,” said Eileen Appelbaum, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research.

“The IRR gives you a great big number, but the true value is nowhere near that great big number,” Appelbaum said. “As every public pension fund and every finance person knows, this is not money you can take to the bank.”

Appelbaum said the formula was created to help CFOs weigh the costs of investments, such as a new piece of machinery, within their own company, and assumes that the rate of return for one asset can be repeated year over year.

Confusing IRR for net annual return can have comical results, as shown by Ludovic Phalippou, a professor of financial economics at Oxford. In a recent paper for Investments & Wealth Review, Phalippou calculated that if the private equity portion of Yale’s endowment had a 36% annual net return since 1990, it would be worth $5 trillion. Instead, the entire endowment is worth $41 billion.

Alternative return numbers

Appelbaum prefers the Public Market Equivalent, or PME, formula to compare public and private returns. Two economists developed PME in the late 1990s to address the shortcomings of IRR. There are a few different ways to calculate the number, but all try to make it easier to compare a fund’s returns to a stock market index.

However, pension funds tend to calculate this number themselves or hire a consultant to do it for them — putting it out of reach for the average investor.

The industry is adopting another metric, distribution to paid-in capital or DPI, which actually does equate to money in the bank. It is expressed as a ratio of the amount of money originally invested. A DPI of 1 means you made your money back, a DPI of 2 means you doubled it.

This is a helpful measure for cash-hungry investors, but it’s only useful after the fact. A low DPI doesn’t necessarily mean bad performance, wrote Phalippou.

“‘DPI is the new IRR’ makes for good conference banter, but it’s a silly yardstick,” Phalippou wrote to Business Insider. “You can have a DPI of exactly 0.0× and be doing great — for example, a young fund with strong unrealized gains that simply hasn’t distributed yet.”

Indexes and valuation

Deciding what formula to use to judge returns is just the first step. Investors will also want to figure out how they compare to the stock market — opening up a whole new can of worms.

The S&P 500 or Dow Jones may be household names, but private equity returns are often compared to underperformers like the Russell 3000 or MSCI World Index.

“They like to use the Russell 3000 because it is a worse performer,” Hooke said.

When Hooke tested the returns of 19 large players, comparing them to the S&P 500 from 2007 to 2020, he found that fewer than half beat the market.

As an individual investor, you may not even receive enough information about the performance of the assets in a private fund to calculate things like Public Market Equivalent. You might be stuck with whatever metrics the fund and your retirement provider calculate for you.

You’ll also have to rely on the fund’s valuations of those assets. The only way to know the true value of a private asset is to sell it, but unsold assets need to be valued to calculate a fund’s performance.

This process, known as “mark to market,” tasks private equity investors with appraising the value of their private holdings. They do this by comparing their holdings to similar ones that have been sold recently in order to come up with a fair market value, similar to the process of appraising a home.

“It’s almost 100% on the honor system,” Hooke said.

Auditing firms will do a “smell test” on these valuations, said Hooke, but they can only review a small fraction of valuations themselves.

A 2024 Morningstar report highlights another problem: these calculated values are much less volatile than the public markets, known as the “appraisal-smoothing model.”

Less volatility might be a selling point for the private markets, but it also means that true comparison to the stock market is a challenge, according to Morningstar.

Fiduciaries

The good news is that a retirement saver won’t have to figure this out alone. 401(k) retirement plans aren’t a free-for-all, with individuals deciding where they’d like to park their nest egg. Instead, there are layers of professionals responsible for building, evaluating, and presenting plans to 401(k) participants, who then choose from a list of potential options.

Some of these professionals, like the employer offering the plan and the human resources teams administering it, have a fiduciary duty. This means they must make decisions based solely on the interests of those in the plan when evaluating retirement plans, at the threat of costly and embarrassing lawsuits.

Trump’s executive order makes it clear that fiduciaries will remain responsible for protecting savers, including when evaluating private fund investment options.

In other good news, industry experts tend to think that private assets will likely make up a relatively small portion of one’s 401(k). One option being tested is a private fund that occupies 5% to 10% of a larger managed plan, like a target date fund. This means that instead of having unlimited options for their retirement capital, plan participants are more likely to have just a few — or even just one private option — to break their brains when assessing performance.

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