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Originally Posted by Table 5
I'm guessing it was the DeBeers marketing dept that came up with this "rule".
Diamonds seem like the biggest scam going. The only reason a normally sane and logical man ponys up is to keep the peace and makes their girls happy. There's no way those prices make any sense to me.
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It's funny you should say that. I have a few friends who are management/higher ups in diamond mining, and they've all told me basically the same thing over the years. They've told me that the diamond industry came up with the two month salary rule and pushed it really hard for a while to get it out there in people's minds so that if a guy didn't shell out this exorbitant amount of money for an engagement ring he'd look cheap, and to make the woman expect a lot more. Also it's well known by most higher ups in the mining aspect that diamonds are not so rare as the industry would have you believe, and that there are millions of them sitting in warehouses around the world and are being held back in order to drive/keep the prices up. I know it sounds like a conspiracy theory, but these guys all work for different companies, and have discussed this independently from each other with me, so I tend to believe it.
As far as the original poster, if you don't have much of a budget you could do what a couple of my friends did. Go cubic zirconia for the first ring, then after you get established and start making more money replace it with a real diamond on one of your anniversaries. I think one of my buddies did that on his third and one did it on his fifth if I recall.