MSE News: Get engaged on Valentine's Day? Don't forget to insure your ring

A question about : MSE News: Get engaged on Valentine's Day? Don't forget to insure your ring

Without insurance and an up-to-date valuation, you could be at risk of not being able to claim...

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Get engaged on Valentine's Day? Don't forget to insure your ring

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Best answers:

• I'm surprised at MSE perpetuating the marketing from De Beers that a ring should cost two months salary! Indeed, they upped it to two months in the 80's after the success of their one month campaign a few decades before. Conventional wisdom or folly?
  In the UK, one survey put the average spend as around three weeks of the average wage.
  https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-27371208
• Naah, Lizzy Duke's, Ј150.00 but I was mis-sold the extended warranty, what should I do?
• I believe their "senior insurance writer" has recently left
• If it's not been recently valued your insurance provider won't take into account any increases in the market, so you'll just be paid an amount based on the last time it was valued.
  Is that correct?
• It makes it harder to argue the case but certainly not impossible
  These things are not helped by jewelry valuers being a pain and generally refusing to value something based on someone elses description of the item in case the other valuers miss judged the quality of the stone/ metals etc
• I recently lost a small diamond from my 30 year old eternity ring. The excess on my policy was Ј100 and the cost of replacing the diamond was Ј150. I opted not to proceed with the insurance claim. I then realised that my valuation was over 20 years old. I asked the jeweller if they would give me a up-to-date valuation after they completed the work. They quoted Ј140 for the valuation. This is in Edinburgh and they said all the jewellers use the same valuer. I'll have to save up for that and lock up my ring in the meantime!
• Valuations can be done on one of two basis, fixed fee or percentage of value. Depending on how many items you have and how certain you are of their value then one or the other method can be better for you.
  Many companies that offer "valuations" actually use third parties and so you may find commonality across many of them. There are associations of valuers and such that will give you the details of actual valuers rather than those that sell the services of others.
  From my distant memory I think in London fixed price valuations were around Ј50 each and valuation based were 2% or so.
• I was getting an engagement ringed re-sized recently and asked him to give me a valuation whilst he had it.
  It was either Ј25 or Ј35 (all in) - certainly a lot less than Ј140 and 2%.