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Should you spend a whopping two months’ salary on an engagement ring? That depends on whether you listen to your own instincts, or a global jewelry company’s marketing department. Photo: Mary McCartney/DeBeers via Facebook

Recently, one of my friends was curtain shopping when she received some pretty crazy advice from a friendly store employee.

“You should expect to spend around 5% of your home’s value on curtains and draperies,” the saleswoman explained as she sauntered around the sales floor.

Over the last several months, I’ve answered a big handful of “buy it for life” questions in the reader mailbag. Because the answers to those questions have been so spread out, a few people recently have asked me if there is a single place where they can go to find all of the “buy it for life” recommendations I’ve made in the reader mailbags.

That’s exactly what this post is – a collection of the “buy it for life” tips from previous reader mailbags, rewritten a bit to include updated information as I’ve found it.

What Is ‘Buy It for Life’?

Before we dive in, it makes sense to define what exactly “buy it for life” means. In its simplest form, it means that you’re buying an item where reliability and lifespan are the most important factors. These items just work and they keep working.

About a year ago, I spent a rainy afternoon going through my credit card and bank statements and categorizing the expenses. Most of the time, I have a pretty good mental picture of what I’ll discover when I do this – it’s when my mental picture doesn’t match the expenses that I start to worry.

What I couldn’t help but notice was that there were a lot of little charges to Amazon sprinkled throughout the bill.

Now, I expected to see a few of those little expenses. I buy a book or two for my Kindle each month as part of my usual budgeted entertainment expenses, so seeing a few little Amazon charges isn’t a big deal.

I just saw a lot more of them than I expected.

So, I started digging into the mystery by examining my Amazon purchase history. What I found, after some research, is that those purchases were actually Kindle purchases that I had made. I just had forgotten about a number of them and hadn’t adequately recorded them during the month.

Need a graduation gift for a high-school senior who’s headed to college? You can’t go wrong with school-branded gear like hats and sweatshirts for their freshman year. Photo: John Martinez Pavliga

Summer is almost upon us, and with it a barrage of social events, from backyard barbecues to weddings to, of course, graduation parties.

And while you can bring a tray of baked beans to a neighborhood cookout, and something straight off the registry to a wedding, it’s often difficult to decide what to get a newly-minted high school graduate.