a neat way of building an incremental price with jquery/javascript ?

I have a site where a product has a basic price, which is potentially customised by several options, each of which is chosen from a select list.
I would like to have a field/label which is updated via jquery or javascript whenever an option is chosen, so that before the customer adds an item to the cart, they can see how much the customised product will cost.
My select lists are each populated from a recordset, and use their respective ID as ID, and description as a value.
(I can append the value string in the select list with a price).

Using jquery, I can use the syntax var val1 = $("#selectoptioncolour").val(); to retrieve the select ID and var val1a = $("#selectoptioncolour :selected").text(); as its description, but is there an easy way to get the price for the selected option, other than trying to extract a substring from the description ?

the only other way i can think of would be an ajax query to look up the price based on the selected ID

Okay.

I think in this instance, it would be easier to use the string manipulation approach, but I will look at using ajax more as I improve my jquery skills .

Thanks again