Have some extra you want to keep for harder times? Convert it to gold and hang it on your wife's ears. Many other things we take for granted now are storage: cheese, wine, ham, jam are all efficient ways to store food.

So giving a diamond to your wife is just a supplemental reserve of wealth. Read only two books about people of the past, you'll see many stories of ladies selling their earrings when in trouble and getting through by this mean.