My friend P. is a notorious tightwad although she makes a great salary and has no dependents. She seeks out free or cheap food and other giveaways at every opportunity.
My friend C. says she has financial problems but that doesn’t stop her from shopping and eating out every chance she gets.
My friend L. is a completely different case. She and I have gotten into it a few times recently because I said that the L.A. Co. fair was ridiculously overpriced and designed to rip you off at every turn. She said I’m being an “old biddy.” She said the same thing when I remarked that movie theatres are a real turn-off now because it’s so expensive to go into one–and the same argument came up again regarding the Farmers market in L.A… I have a rather low income, but even if I made a better salary, I still object to things costing way, way more than they should. It takes the fun out of it when you have to keep pulling out your wallet.
I don’t know why, but L’s comments have been bugging me lately. How is it that I am an old fuddy-duddy because I don’t want to just spend like a maniac on things that aren’t worth it?
More to the point, have you “gotten into it” with friends and family over monetary issues, attitudes towards spending, etc.?
Because things cost what they cost. Who are you to say they should cost more or less just because of your personal financial situation? Movies have been expensive forever. Yet people always seem to bitch about the price.
My personal beef is with people who go out to dinner with a group and somehow think that the $20 they left on the table covers their share of a steak dinner and several hour’s worth of drinks, plus tip. Or not to mention people who bitch about tipping. In the USA, 15-20% is a standard restaurant tip. If you cannot cover that in addition to the cost of your meal, you can’t afford to eat at that restaurant.
We usually go to second-run, matinee movies because they cost one-quarter what a new movie costs; there is nothing I have to see the second it comes out. I only buy clothes on sale - regular priced clothes are about 75% profit for the store, and I just don’t want to give them that much money. I don’t see anything wrong with conserving your money, rather than just throwing it around. I will spend money on things that I think are worth it, but that’s for me and my husband to decide, not my friends.
People might think I’m cheap, but I would have a hard time caring less. It’s not their money.
I agree with you about the “fair” - here it’s not even a fair anymore; it’s a carnival. There aren’t any livestock or 4-H exhibits; no quilts or beautiful jars of jelly to admire. There’s nothing you can do other than spend money, so I don’t go. The Tennessee State Fair at least had free exhibits including rabbits and chickens, with the aforementioned quilts - and .38 Special! It was worth spending some money on.
I think everyone has their “thing” they will spend money on that others think is silly. Mine is game-worn hockey jerseys.
Students of my major (ChemE) and country (Spain) are pretty much the exact opposite of party animals. We’d have two or three parties a year, they were whole-major affairs organized by the people in the 3rd year, and most of us wouldn’t go to parties from other majors - we were busy studying.
A few times we had parties I didn’t go to for lack of money. The first time this came up, a couple of my classmates (both of them girls whose weekend budget was greater than my monthly one) started nagging me about it: “but it’s important to socialize with the rest of the class!” “but it’s like, three times a year!” “but I hear that club is really cool!” “but it’s only 2000 pta!”
“2000? 2000 the ticket! PLUS hairdresser, plus a new blouse because I just don’t have any which are in decent wear for a party, plus spending the night out (my dorm’s doors closed at 11pm), plus cabs, plus… are you going to pay for it? No? So Shut Up!”
They never gave me that crap again.
On a different line, what’s expensive for one person is cheap for another. My SiL and Mom spend a lot in clothes and makeup and perfume, I spend a lot less in clothes and nothing in makeup or perfume; I spend a lot in electronics, they spend nothing thanks to having around several technophilics who keep them in hand-me-downs (my old computers go to Littlebro, to Mom, right now one has gone to the electrician who’s redone my home’s wiring; SiL’s brother’s hand-me-downs go to Middlebro/her). The electrician was having problems understanding how come I was giving away a perfectly-functional computer… with 128M RAM: it works fine for what he needs it, but I’ve got documents it wouldn’t even be able to open, so its replacements were cheap for me on account of “they allow me to do my job”.
Sounds like “friend L.” has a problem with you, maybe even about something else that isn’t as easy to bring up. If not, she may be looking at YOU as “friend P.”
I’ve found it interesting to see that what people consider “cheap” or “expensive” says a lot about what their interests and values are - and I’m not saying that to be snarky. I mean it’s an indicator of sorts.
Take my mother, for example. She was a stay-at-home mom in the 60s with 5 kids. There was no money to be wasted on frivolous spending, and anything that could be repurposed was. When my boots developed leaks, I remember her giving me empty bags from bread to slip over my socks to keep my feet dry inside the boots because she couldn’t afford to buy me a new pair. We never threw away margarine tubs - they became our “tupperware.” To this day, she washes and saves bread bags, zip lock bags, margarine tubs, plastic takeout containers, and all sorts of other things to be reused.
And yet she has no qualms at all about taking her children, grandchildren, and their respective spouses out to dinner in a really nice, expensive restaurant - I’m talking where the tab may come to $800-$1000 or more for a meal. She shops at dollar stores and grows a lot of her own vegetables, but this January, she’s invited us all to be her guests for a 12-day Caribbean cruise.
She can’t let go of the frugality that allowed us to have a comfortable, if not extravagant, life as kids, even tho my dad left her financially set when he died. Instead, she prefers that when she does spend, it’s for something she and we will really enjoy. So when she stops me from throwing away my big gulp cup (she rinses them out and gives them to people who want a soda for the road) I just chuckle to myself at the contrast.
I admit my bitterness may be stupid and/or irrational. But growing up, despite all the “we can’t afford that” griping I got from my mother, her tendency to go chintzy on clothes and shoes for the kids, and not giving us an allowance (though, to be fair, we didn’t ask for one), she and my dad are sure living it up now. I understand that financial situations change as people grow older and the kids move out…and kids certainly aren’t entitled to anything…but it wasn’t like my father had a small income or that he had to put us through college or anything. He didn’t even save anything for our college educations. So I feel like they were frugal for some things (their kids) but not really frugal for themselves. Which strikes me as kind of selfish. My father has admitted as much now, with regrets, but not my mother. She still has this sense of entitlement thing going on. And it’s sad and a bit scary because I don’t know how she’ll cope when the money tree withers away.
I’m with you, though, viva. I evaluate things based on their value to me and rate accordingly. I don’t care that all the movie theaters are charge $13.00…it’s still overpriced. I’d rather catch a flick at the two-dollar cheapie theater, watching a movie that’s not brand new but one I haven’t seen, and still be able to buy popcorn without taking out a loan.
The only time I go to the state fair is when I volunteer there and thus get a free ticket. Not all the elephant ears in the world can make me pay to go to that chicken-fried, Confederate-flag draped affair. It just isn’t worth that much to me.
Not that I can remember. Everyone places value on different things, and convincing someone that the things they like to spend money on are overpriced is a losing battle. They’re going to think you’re judging them as a spendthrift, pretty much no matter how you say it. Besides, everyone in my family spends money on something, and it’s different for everyone. For my brother, it’s his motorcycles, my mom enjoys fancy beauty products, my sister likes to vacation, and my husband and I like to eat out. Each of us probably thinks the others’ spending on their respective priorities is silly, but saying something would be pointless. The only time it gets tricky is when someone else wants me to spend money on something I think is overpriced. That doesn’t come up often, though.
You are exhibiting wishful thinking as a logical fallacy: you wish that movies cost less, therefore you have come to the conclusion that they should cost less.
Agree with msmith537: prices are what they are, and your notion of what prices “should” be is based on a purely subjective sense of the value (of the product or service being offered) relative to your net worth. If you had recently won a $100M lottery, you probably wouldn’t care so much about how much it cost to go to a movie.
FWIW, I’m with you on movies: I’ve been to the cinema maybe twice in the past ten years, and then only because friends invited me. Part of it is the fact that they are now cramming commercial advertisements in before the actual movie starts, and part of it is having to share a theatre with a bunch of strangers who are munching and crunching and murmuring, and part of it is having to adhere to the theatre’s schedule - but a big part of it is cost. Wife and I can go to a movie for, what $20? Or we can stay home and rent a Blu-Ray for $4, drink beer, skip the advertisements, pause the movie to pee when we want to, and so on. Awesome.
My experience with my parents is similar to that of FairyChatMom. My parents lived frugally all their lives, and although they now are very well off in retirement and have enjoyed traveling the world, in their daily lives their cheap habits just won’t go away. They’ve been on countless RV trips and cruises in the past decade or so - but my dad still looks forward to Taco Tuesday, when tacos are sold at at a discount. When they eat at other fast food restaurants where the receipt invites you to call a number and give your opinion about a visit, they make that call - because they end up receiving a coupon code for a free sandwich on their next visit. Rather than pay for a service, my mom insists on cleaning their house’s outside windows herself, which requires standing on a ladder; this is, quite frankly, a life-threatening proposition for an elderly woman with osteoporosis and less-than-stellar balance. Their nest egg is such that they are not going to run out of money before they die, and so these things (climbing ladders and eating cheap fast food to excess) frustrate me and my sibs: none of us needs any inheritance at all from them, and money-saving practices like these are compromising their health and safety, meaning they are likely to be taken from us sooner than if they had gone ahead and spent more money on themselves.
I’m less bothered by their lifelong practice of buying used cars. That’s a very smart way to save money - if that’s what you want to do. Me? My first two cars were well-used (a hand-me-down and then a purchase, both from my folks). Since then I’ve bought a brand-new car and two brand-new motorcycles, with no regrets. It’s cost me quite a bit, but I enjoy getting exactly what I want, and having new vehicles that no one else has driven, and FWIW I trim the per-mile cost a bit by keeping them for a long time (ten years). My car will be ten years old next year, and I’ll replace it again with a brand-new one - to be kept for the next ten years.
There’s not a nice way to tell someone they’re being That Guy, is there? Then I’ll just go with the blunt way. You’re being That Guy. Everyone hates being around That Guy. People by and large don’t care if you don’t want to spend money on something. However, we care very much if you won’t STFU about not wanting to spend money on something. That becomes really annoying really fast, and it makes you sound like my mother who is rather an old biddy.
No, really. She has a running list of restaurants she’ll never go back to over some fairly trifling service issue or because the price is too high, a list of jewelry stores she won’t patronize because the salesperson looked at her funny or their prices are too high, a list of hairdressers she won’t go back to because they charge too much, a list of…well, you get the picture. About once a month my phone call home leads to a recounting of some run-in she’s had with some sort of service personnel over something or other. A while back the touring company of Beauty and the Beast came to their town and Mom wanted to take my niece…until she found out what the tickets cost, at which point she spent the next TWO MONTHS frothing at the mouth about how outrageous and overpriced it was and how could anybody who wasn’t a ritzy-titzy doctor’s wife afford to take a family of children to see it and blahblahblah.
Mind you, my parents each belong to two bowling leagues and rent a locker at the alley because the money is worth not schlepping a bag from the car. They golf roughly 3 times a week when the weather is nice. They own a buttload of equipment for both sports. They eat out about 5 times a week. When they went to Branson last time they saw two or three shows ever day. They went to Hawaii last year. Incidentally, I don’t really see how someone would take a family of children to do any of those things without dropping a pretty penny, but that’s suddenly an irrelevant criteria when it comes to things she normally spends money on.
Don’t be like my mother. Keep your wallet in your pocket all you want, but at least have the grace to hush about it.
With your friend L, did she invite you to join her at the fair, and did you then go into a diatribe about how it is overpriced? Or did you both go together, but then when you got there, did you start complaining about the prices? I ask because if you did either of those things, that is really annoying. That kind of complaining can really ruin other people’s enjoyment of an event.
If you don’t want to do something because it is too expensive, then just say you don’t want to go, or that you have other plans. Nothing is more of a mood killer than to go on an outing with a person who doesn’t want to be there and who then makes sure everyone else in the group knows just how unhappy they are.
Among my friends, we’re pretty similar in attitude. We’re all from more or less the same socio-economic background and we’re all relatively successful professionals (predominantly architects, with a few IT guys, lawyers, legal secretaries, a couple of financial types and a marketing exec.)
For the most part, we’re not terribly extravagant, but some of us do definitely have more money than others, and it primarily shows in the toys they buy and things they do- those of us with more money drive BMWs, or have become gun collectors, or go on foreign vacations every couple of years, while those of us with less tend to drive their cars a lot longer, and go visit family if they go anywhere on their time off.
Within the family, my parents are relatively frugal, but not ridiculously so, but my MIL is absurdly so, which is kind of funny, because she’s sitting on a pile of property and property sale derived money that she inherited. She’s one of those bread-bag reusers, and is just pointlessly stingy when she could afford to spend an extra $50 a year for new ziploc brand name bags and never miss the money in the least, much less dollar-store ones.
It can be a source of friction between her and my wife and I at times; she’ll want to cheap out on things that cheaping out on will make things far more difficult; like saving $40 on airfare, but causing us fairly major hardship to pick her up for the airport. What frustrates us is that in that case, we effectively bore the extra cost for her to save a few bucks.
I’m always surprised when people talk about how much movies cost these days.
Still a complete bargain in my opinion when compared to other “shows” one can see. NFL, MLB, NBA, NHL games are at the very least $25 for crappy seats and can easily top $100 for good ones. Plays and musicals are big bucks. Cirque du Soleil is huge bucks. Concerts are big bucks.
But a few hundred people spend multi-millions putting together movies like Dark Knight, Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Pixar and everybody wants to complain about putting in their $11.
Complaining about prices doesn’t make you an old biddy. Complaining about prices nowadays makes you sound old, though. (I can’t comment on your biddyness.)
Do you have kids? You know how people say they are expensive? It’s true. I never understood either until I had them. The next 7 years of our lives (until the kids don’t have to go to daycare afterschool) are going to be the most expensive of our family’s life. The next five won’t be too bad (highschool) and the college years will be almost as tough. After that, we will seriously have a lot of extra money.
However, right now, the kids get most of their clothes at Once Upon a Child (though they get to pick), we shop at the cheap grocery store and generally don’t buy anything if it can be avoided. If not, we would have problems staying afloat. Granted, we also wear our own clothes until they are too bad for even goodwill and will check out thrift shops before we buy new (and even then only on sale). We are also saving for and intend to pay for college.
All that said, I bet when the kids are gone and out on their own they are going to be displeased with the amount of money we have, too. It’s a function of time and they will get to that point, as well.
With your friend L, did she invite you to join her at the fair, and did you then go into a diatribe about how it is overpriced? Or did you both go together, but then when you got there, did you start complaining about the prices? I ask because if you did either of those things, that is really annoying. That kind of complaining can really ruin other people’s enjoyment of an event.
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I went on my own. I don’t get into these arguments at the events or places themselves.
