How much did you spend on your engagement ring?

Branshen

After reading online about how De Beers marketed diamond engagement rings for couples, I'm wondering how much people actually spend on engagement rings. I'm getting to my mid 20s so I am the target market for these things.

Surely people don't pay several months worth of salary right? That sounds crazy! And did you get a diamond? Or something else?

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/02/how-an-ad-campaign-invented-the-diamond-engagement-ring/385376/

fields5069

I/we (as if I had a say!) went vintage, and got an old-cut diamond solitaire, i.e. deeper than modern cut, with diamond baguette shoulders. The solitaire is about 1.3 ct, the ring is platinum, it's from the 1910s or 20s. The solitaire has a slight flaw, but when it's clean it sparkles like a good 'un so I wouldn't get too hung up on perfection or ideal clarity.

It cost more than my take-home monthly wage back then in 1999, it was £2400. More importantly, I/we really couldn't find anything else with such good design and proportions in a modern ring. Just make sure you get the mount seen to if you go down this route. After about 4 years the solitaire came out of its mount and we temporarily lost it, in our house with bare floorboards and large void underneath. Cue me flashing a torch on various bits of solder under the boards, thinking I'd found the diamond. Luckily it turned up in the hall, one of the few rooms with a proper floor covering! Phew!

jonnyburgo

£60 second hand from a little stall in the old corn exchange in Manchester, white gold with a stone. The wedding rings are simple silver bands at £20 each. Luckily my wife couldnt give a fuck about bling and frankly if I was expected to spend a lot I would seriously have had second thoughts. Don't see the point in spending shit loads, its a ring, it doesnt DO anything, and more money spent does not equate to more love. 2 mates of mine went the whole hog big rings, big wedding, all the trimmings around £25,000 both divorced now.

Each to their own though.

JRL

Nothing! Wife didn't want one, so spent a bit more on the wedding rings.

fretmeister

£99. I was a student and was all I had.

WezV

£500 on a "vintage" ring. it was the absolute maximum she would let me spend as didn't want to be walking around with a few grand on her finger.

A few months wages often gets quoted as the correct figure, particularly if you read the helpful guides produced by jewelers;)

octatonic

Zero. We bought a buy-to-let property instead.

Teetonetal

Not a lot relative to what some people spend. I think it was about £180. I do remember being given some pretty hefty sales speeches and I also remember being quote the 2 or months wages thing.

At the time, there was no way I could have even begun to afford that and 180 was right at the top end of my budget. 

Happily my wife is not into diamonds and is another who thinks walking around with a grands worth of jewelry is asking for trouble.. To be honest if  I thought she was the type who wanted £2500 worth of wedding ring, i don't think I would have been marrying her.

stickyfiddle

I can't remember the exact number but it was about 10% more than my most expensive guitar at the time. Sod all that DeBeers stuff though - hers is certified non-conflict and all that shizzle.

Branshen

fretmeister;1004245" said:

£99. I was a student and was all I had.

Not unlike the Bible classic "the widow's offering" then.

digitalscream

First attempt or second?

'Cos on my first attempt to buy an engagement ring, I came home with a Playstation instead.

EricTheWeary

Whenever I've looked ( because people show you these things wether you want to look or not) I've never seen anybody have an engagement ring that looked like a few month's salary. But you have variables like the quality of the stones and the gold that , I think, most people just can't tell. At the time we had a distant relative in the trade ( due to the jewellery quarter there's quite a few people in trading, manufacture, wholesale and retail of jewellery in Birmingham) and we sourced the engagement and wedding rings through him. I can't remember the exact figure but certainly way less than a month's salary on the engagement ring and quite little on plain wedding bands. Anecdotally I've often said the more you spend on the wedding the shorter the marriage is and there was something in the news about this maybe a year ago which seemed to evidence this. Googles - http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2501480

Roland

Two weeks wages. Afterwards I asked other people, and they seemed to have spent similar amounts. It was a learning experience because we both knew nothing about jewelry, and still have little interest in it. You learn about each other tastes, and discover something about your own. We started out looking for a platinum solitaire diamond, decided we didn't like it, and ended up with a Victorian five stone in gold.

boogieman

My wife chose her own. I'm glad she did because it was nothing I would have picked for her myself. It was £900 I think, white gold with two diamonds and a central square cut sapphire. I insisted she had one because although I'd been married twice before, I'd never bought my first two wives an engagement ring. This time I wanted to do things "properly".

chillidoggy

£50 in 1980. That was a lot of dosh back then.

Sporky

Haven't bought it yet - we just got wedding rings. Before we were married. Lady BMcH's was about £200, mine was about £40. Both titanium. because of that bit in The Abyss.

ICBM

I think £39, in 1986 - but I can't remember for sure. It wasn't a particularly expensive one even then.

RobDavies

First one was about sixty quid from Ratners.... I was about eighteen at the time. Needless to say, that particular relationship didn't last much more than a couple of months. 

 Second time (circa 1998) was £1200 from a jeweller in Hatton Garden. My wife's fingers are too fat to wear it now and it's sitting in a drawer somewhere. 

 Wonder if she'd miss it, because I quite fancy an SG?......

Sporky

RobDavies said:

First one was about sixty quid from Ratners.... I was about eighteen at the time. Needless to say, that particular relationship didn't last much more than a couple of months. 

Longer than the ring then?

Snap

It would ahve been 1994, and I think it was about 600 quid. We bought another a few years ago that cost a lot more, but it was something I wanted to do.

Wedding rings were about 6-700 each I think, can't remember exactly, but they are both platinum. We wanted something special, not planning on doing it twice, and 17 years on, only gets better.

My advice is, as it is with all wedding stuff, you do what you want, cos its nowt to do with anyone else.

Our wedding had 5 people attending, including us, and cost about 200 quid all in. No fuss. Perfect.

Branshen

RobDavies;1004328" said:

First one was about sixty quid from Ratners.... I was about eighteen at the time. Needless to say, that particular relationship didn't last much more than a couple of months. 

 Second time (circa 1998) was £1200 from a jeweller in Hatton Garden. My wife's fingers are too fat to wear it now and it's sitting in a drawer somewhere. 

 Wonder if she'd miss it, because I quite fancy an SG?......

Engaged at 18? That wasn't the norm then right?