My ex spent about a months salary on the ring. Thankfully it’s a tanzanite stone on white gold, so doesn’t look like a traditional engagement ring, and I can still wear it after the divorce if I want without getting odd looks.
Husband spent less than $100 to have his great-grandmother’s ring cleaned and sized. He spent about $3000 on a channel set diamond eternity band to match the old ring, which was less than one months salary. FTR-I don’t wear the engagement ring on a daily basis, but I do wear the wedding band.
I bought my own engagement ring. It contained a cubic zirconia and was about $1000 (mostly because the ring itself was platinum and custom made).
I regret it. In particular, I regret giving into the cultural and familial expectation to get a diamond-like ring, instead of what I really wanted, which was a sapphire or other blue stone. About three years ago, I got a sapphire ring which was about $800 in total, which I now wear instead of my “official” engagement ring. (This was before the great Sapphire Runup in prices of the last several years; it would probably cost me at least twice as much now to replicate the ring.)
If you check with pricescope.com, as cherry suggests, you will get an answer that is skewed upward as much as SD will skew downwards. They are a little crazy about their large-carat rings over there.
~$800 in 1991. More than a week’s gross salary; less than a month’s.
At that time, my then-girlfriend (now wife) and I were spending our summer weekends working at a friend’s shop at the local Renaissance Faire. We were friends with a goldsmith (who also had a shop at the faire), and my girlfriend fell in love with a diamond solitaire ring which he had on display in his shop. She told her friend, her friend told me, and I ran over and bought it.
The ring wasn’t originally meant to be an engagement ring, and when the goldsmith went to make a matching wedding band for her, it was a little tricky, but it turned out beautifully.
$3,500 for Engagement ring+wedding band combo. It was less than a month’s salary for me. I had the money saved up, so spending it on her was no big deal. My brother-in-law spent about $14,000 on his wife’s engagement ring, which was probably closer to 3 months pay for him.
Count me in on someone who doesn’t get this whole ‘3 months salary’ nonsense. But my thing is if you want to buy your honey a huge rock, fine, do it. Want to get her something that looked like it came out of a vending machine? Cool! Don’t believe in handing over a tiny piece of crystallized carbon? More power to you! People should do what they want, not want they think they are supposed to do.
Compared to many dopers, I spent a ‘lot’ of money on my wife’s ring, but I had the money saved up, and that savings was just passive “my checking account is $400 bigger this month than last month without even budgeting anything”, so its not like I was living on Ramen and Ketchup and hitchiking to work every day. So for me it was worth it. Similarly, we spent a “lot” on our wedding, but it was basically like throwing the party of the year for 250 people, and people still thank us for inviting them to such a wonderful experience, so it was worth it. Sure, we could have been stingy and used all that money to be $XX,000 closer toward the down payment on a house, but in hindsight we don’t regret it 
Personally, I feel that after a certain point, “Three month’s salary.” is absurd. I spent somewhere around $3500. Less than a month’s take-home. The only reason it cost that much was because I picked out a stone with exceptional color, clarity, and cut, and I did that because those things were important to me, not necessarily her. I’m sure she would have been happy with any ring at all.
I can understand someone wanting a $10K+ ring. That’s just not my style, and I’m pretty confident that specific someone and I wouldn’t have made it to the third date.
Thanks for the replies.
I got a good deal. I bought the diamond separately (roughly 1 ct for 800,) then took it for a custom ring and mount. At that time, gold was $200/ozt, so it cost another hundred for that. I’d say 1k is a good, but not extravagant amount.
Yeah, the commercials are 100% BS. 100 years ago, it wasn’t even a tradition, it was purely manufactured by debeers.
I spent $3,200 in 1996. At the time, I made about $42,000 a year. I knew my wife (then girlfriend) liked a particular cut of diamond and even a particular store chain, so I bought it from them, which made the process pretty painless (other than forking over the money, of course).
My wife and I became engaged in 1989; I don’t know if that’s too far back for the OP’s purposes. Back then, I was making approximately $13K a year. That’s right. A year. The engagement ring I bought my wife was $185 from Zales.; it was a piece of crap, it was all I could afford, and my wife loved it.
When my husband bought my ring he was still financially recovering from his divorce (ha!). He sold his oscilloscope to buy it, and it’s exactly the ring I wanted. It was two-thirds of a month’s salary for him.
Oh, and that was 2008.
I spent zero, not out of any disregard for engagement rings but simply because we were never formally engaged. At some point, it just became a given that we were going to be married, and neither of us can pinpoint an exact moment.
Paid nothing for our wedding rings too, because in my wife’s family’s brand of Chinese, so I was told, it is customary for the future mother-in-law to supply the rings. She took us down to one of her regular gold shops here in Bangkok’s Chinatown, one that she trusted, and got us a pair of very nice gold wedding rings. Mine is pretty hefty, and considering how much gold has risen in price during the intervening years, I’m wearing practically a small fortune.
Paid zero for the wedding itself too, as it was held in my in-laws home with my wife’s mother, in traditional Chinese style, performing the ceremony herself.
(In Thailand, they practice what is called “bride price,” which is the opposite of a dowry in that the prospective groom pays his future wife’s family some money. This has led to tales of bitter disagreements through the years, with poor Thai families viewing prospective Western sons-in-law as a source of cash and setting a high price for their daughter. But my wife’s family is actually richer than I am, and they really didn’t care about bride price, so I didn’t even have to pay that.)
My husband spent slightly over 3 paychecks on it, but he took the money out of savings. He bought it on his own-we didn’t do any shopping together but apparently he called my sister and figured out what I’d like in terms of style.
We live in New York so my ring is teeny tiny compared to most of the women walking around here, but it’s the perfect size for me (I have a 4.5 finger). It’s a very high quality 1 carat diamond solitaire in white gold, and I absolutely love it, but when I found the receipt I pretty much told him we were done with diamonds forever.
My wife was an accomplished amateur jeweler and knew lots of people in the business. She designed her own ring carving the wax mold herself and then had a friend with a studio cast it for her. The top of the diamond is flush with the top of the ring since she works with her hands a lot and didn’t want a stone that could get snagged on something.
When we picked out the diamond she had a bag of 50 diamonds or so to pick from. She had a lot of fun pouring them out on the table and going through them with a jewelers loupe. She picked one that was .999Ct since apparently there’s a big bump in price as soon as you hit 1Ct…
In the end we only paid for materials and it cost about $1k with over half of that being the price of the diamond.
At the time, my mom worked for a jewelry company that made rings for high school class rings up to championship rings for professional sports teams like the '01 Diamondbacks and the Chicago Bulls. So I was able to get the diamond as well as the platinum setting at the manufacturer’s cost. I think I paid around $2300 which was less than a month’s salary for a pretty nice ring.
I paid about 2 months pre-tax on it mainly by accident. I looked at what I had in my savings and then with that as my max I found a ring that was absolutely perfect, large sapphire main stone with two good size diamonds as accents. It met my not wanting to buy a diamond ring and her wanting a diamond ring.
That said I’m well out of the OPs salary range and I like to tease my wife that with the wedding band she’s walking around with a small car on her hand.
I spent slightly less than one month’s pay. Three month’s pay is absurd. Even at my relatively meagre salary, that would have exceeded any purchase of a single item I’d ever made in my life.
That would have been about 1/4 the cost of our entire wedding, which was nearly a year’s income for me at the time. We planned the wedding all ourselves, going as cheap as we could while still having a decent location and decorations. If we’d had to pay for it ourselves (her father covered almost everything, including most of the honeymoon) the wedding would have been maybe 3 month’s pay, and would have wiped out more than half our savings.
Three month’s pay is fine for people rich enough to piss away 1/4 of their entire annual income on a pretty rock and not miss it. For normal people, even a month’s worth of income is a significant investment. A lower-middle to solidly middle class male with minimal debt and a reasonable rent is probably lucky to set aside 20%–30% of his income for savings, which means that 3 month’s salary represents roughly an entire year’s worth of savings.
Engagement ring? Nothing, I did not buy her one. She did not see a need for one.
Wedding bands? We spent less then $300.00 on them. 27 Years later we are still happily married. I made about 36,000.00 a year then. She made about the same.
My BIL spent 6,500 on SILs engagement ring. The wedding set was over 10,000.00 He made about 38,000.00 per year then. She made much less then that. They were divorced before their one year anniversary.
Buy what you can afford. Put aside what you can afford every month and save for it. For the love of pete, don’t finance jewelry.
$2631.50 in 1981. Just pulled out the reciept and looked. Didn’t remember that it cost so much. Was about six weeks pay back then. She still loves it. Small by todays standards only 52 points but a very good stone.