The cheapest and/or most money-obsessed person you know - with horror stories, please

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

There’s this lady that I’m somewhat close to (names and relationships will be withheld to protect the guilty), who is absolutely compulsive about money. Obsessed with how much her children are making, etc. Reads receipts in restaurants like a rabbi on the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Her coup de grace, however, came last year, when she needed to have surgery to repair an aneurysm in her brain. She got an evaluation at one hospital; then a second opinion at another. (A smart thing to do, medically speaking.)

Then, she tried to get the brain surgeon at the hospital she wanted to go to lower their rates to the level of the other facility. She literally said, “I’ve got a guy down the road who’s willing to do this for $1,000 less right now.”

She bartered on her BRAIN SURGERY!!!

(Thankfully, she’s now alive and well. Not sure if she saved any money or not.)

Then there’s my mom. I love my mom. She’s my hero. But, she has this addiction to sales.

Mom, there’s a reason that stuff was on the blue-light special at KMart, but thank-you for buying me six of those hunter orange neckties. Yes, you saved 90 percent. But ya know what? You’d have saved that whole two dollars if you didn’t buy them at all!

She also loves garage sales – taking other peoples lying-around crap and turning it into her lying-around crap. Letting it accumulate until she has enough to – you guessed it – have a garage sale. Then, you see, she can use that money toward the sale items at the stores …

2

I think I’ll win this one. And I refuse to withhold names.

My dad’s parents. Hoo boy. First, we have the carpet that’s 40 years old in their house. And they won’t replace. Next, we have withholding graduation cards from the grandkid (me) to earn two month’s more interest on $100. I was the first grandchild out of both high school and college. Oh yeah, and they weren’t mailed, they hand-delivered them to me to save postage.

Finally, we have the debacle that is my godmother’s estate. She was my dad’s mom’s sister. And a packrat. So my grandmother invites my parents up to see if they want anything from the house. It went kinda badly, and my parents felt like they weren’t wanted. Afterwards, several fights erupt over actually giving some of my godmother’s money to the grandkids. (It ended up being like $1200 apiece - I got my new PC with my share.) So, over Memorial Day, my parents go back up to see what’s there. Since I’ll be moving soon, my parents asked if I could have the almost new sofa. My grandmother said okay. While they were there, my mother found 2 dressers, some lamps, the sofa, and some glasses I could use. It was AGREED that my grandparents would hold it in their garage until I moved.

Fast forward two days. My parents have already told me what they’d found. THE NEXT DAY, my grandmother calls them. She’d rather sell the dressers (both of which would bring in about $200 apiece.) tghan give them to me. And I didn’t need lamps, and when was I moving again? I can’t believe she’d rather take the money, which she DOES NOT need, than help me out. rolls eyes

3

I know this guy, Something Something Rex. The guy is completely obsessed with money and believes that anybody who’s got any should be shot.

4

Okay, the first bit of this is not scary. My mother gets things from dumpsters. Lots cleaner than it sounds. I’m not talking about getting french fries from a restaurant dumpster, I’m talking about books, cds, things like that. I do it, too.

My mother, though, gets things from a thrift store dumster and gives them to another thrift store! Not the same chain, but I’ve gotten her to give me her word she will not, if she sees stuff she’s donated before, give them away again.

She also takes books from one library dumpster and gives them to another. Same county and everything. I tell her, “Mama, if another library wanted that, they would have said so.” She also just cannot throw ANYTHING away! She picks trash piles, which isn’t that bad in and of itself, except for the fact that we don’t need what she gets.

Recently she’s taken to buying 25-cent books at yard sales, then selling them online for a couple bucks. She is actually making pretty decent money this way, I kid you not.

That’s my piece.

5

Oh, this is one of my MAJOR pet peeves in life. Cheap bastards. God, I hate people that sit on their money.

The absolute greadiest bastard I know was a flatmate of a friend of mine. We spent a lot of time with a large group of friends watching football and whatnot during the time we studied. This guy, we’ll call him Bart (cause that’s his danm name!), must have stolen at least 30 cartons of smokes from me over the years. Did he ever return the favour? No sirree.

Then there was the beer thing. Sure, we were poor students, but when it came to beer, the majority of our group had decided that there were only a few brands that would make it into our fridge. Grolsch, Brand (it’s a brand name), Heineken and Hertog Jan were acceptable. Not Bart, he wouldn’t do this. When he bought the beer, he always came back with some godawful donkey piss called Opper Bier, pure shite that retailed for about a third the price of Grolsch. But that was not the POINT. It tasted like crap - but that didn’t matter to him.

There’s so much more to tell about this guy. But I’ll fast forward to his wedding, which was 3 weeks ago.

Not only did this idiot organise his wedding party DURING the Holland vs. France match (Euro 2000), he also hosted this soiree in a friggin’ beach cafeteria. I’m telling you, the snacks counter with fries and snacks was standing behind the newlyweds as I congratulated them. There was one of those godawful local hero bands as well, fully dressed in Hawaii shirts and playing 60’s Rock and Roll that urged all the parents, parents-in-law and uncles and aunts to start dancing around, shitfaced as they were.

Not that me and my mates saw a lot of that. We just took a tray of beer outside and followed the football match via our mobiles, courtesy of my best mates’ wife who was at home because she’s pregnant with twins.

It was the best example of how not to marry. He also married on a wednesday, which is the day all the municipalities in the Netherlands marry people for free. This is of course meant for actual POOR people, not for a doctor and a lab worker getting married. Cheap bastards! Ugh!!

6

I don’t think my stories compare with what’s already been related, but what the hell. I had an acquaintance who would always refuse to go out anywhere with us:

“I can’t afford to eat out.”
“But we’re going to Taco Bell.”
“Sorry.”

On the few occasions he actually ended up dining with us, he would invariably complain about the prices. Once we got out in the parking lot of the restaurant after we ate and he pulled out from under his shirt a drinking glass he had taken from the table! In his mind, he’d paid so much for his dinner that he deserved to take part of his place setting home.

Another time when I was not with him but some friends were, they ate at a buffet-style restaurant where you were charged a flat price for getting a plate and you could eat as much as you liked. He apparently ate quite a lot, but when the waitress came around to tally up the bill, he hid his dirty plate on the floor under the table so that he wouldn’t be charged. :rolleyes:

I know there are other egregious examples. I’ll try to remember.

7

Hey, Bill, I know the same guy! I’ve never seen such jealousy! “Rich people don’t deserve…rich kids don’t deserve…ought to take it all away…”

(shudder)

8

My ex-girlfriend was positively insane about money. Her mom was loaded and sent her checks, jewelry, art, a new car, you name it. She (my ex) had well over $100,000 in the bank. Of course, she always complained about not having any money.

Her mother, unfortunately, died of cancer. (She was such a classy lady too; how she ever produced such an evil daughter, I don’t know. But I digress.) Well, before she died even, my ex (we were still together at the time) decided to drive down and grab all the loot she could before sister could get any of it. Especially the original artwork and jewelry. She even confronted her aunt about a piece that the aunt had that my ex claimed mom wanted her to have.

I still feel terrible about the whole thing because I was there to witness and even help put the stuff in the car. Her dad just sat by and watched. He was too concerned over mom’s health, and he wasn’t the kind to say anything about it, anyway.

My ex made out well in the will, but not to hear her tell it. One of the last things she said was how she wished there was a safety deposit box only for her. Her wish was to open it and find a million dollars with a note from her mom expressing love.

Of course my thought was “Hey, how about an expression of love without the dough? That wouldn’t mean anything to you?”

I realize I should have been man enough to confront the evil one about this, as well as a lot of other things. Needless to say, I’ve learned a lot since then.

(Oh, and she could never pay a bill on time! She’d wait until the past due notices were piling up and then get all pissed about it. It wasn’t like she didn’t have the money. And woe be to me if I offered to pay, or gently suggested she send off a check. Anything that could be perceived as criticism caused her to become furious. I’m talking throwing plates and breaking phones furious.)

9

When my step-father passed away I found out the true meaning of greed. The house that him and my mother shared was left to my mom to do with what she wanted. When his daughter (she is truly the nasties person I have ever met) found out she lost her mind. She thought that she and her brother should have been left the house so that she could sell it. The house was not even worth alot because they still had quite a lot to pay on it. Never mind that her husband makes over $300,000 a year and has no money worries whatsoever. Never mind that he had left another house and property to both the daughter and son. At the funeral they, the daughter and son, had the audacity to ask if my car was in their dads name because they planned on trying to take it from me (of course it was in my name - I alone paid for it) to make sure they got everything that was owed to them.

My mother decided to move in with her sister and knew she wouldnt need a lot of the household items so she called the daugher to ask if she wanted anything from the house like the riding lawn mower or other household items. The daughter said she didn’t need the mower or anything else because she had everthing she needed. Well mom decided to have a garage sale and when the daughter found out about it she became very angry because money was now involved and she suddenly wanted half the money from the sale of the lawn mower. She was so greedy that she made sure she was there so she was sure to get her half. My mom was to upset at the time to argue with her and just gave in to her to keep the peace.

My stepfather had a large coin collection and had asked that his mother take the coins before he died because he knew his daughter would try to take them and sell them. After the funeral the daughter asked her grandmother where the coins were and was told that she had them and was going to have them equally divided among my stepfathers grandkids, there were three at the time. At this time the daughter asked her grandmother when this would be because she wanted to see what they were worth so that she could sell them. The grandmother ended up keeping all the coins because she was afraid that his daughter was going to sell them instead of give them to the kids.

So there you have it, she is truly the most money obsessed nasty person I have ever know.

10

There wsa at one point in the Guinness Book of World Records (I am not making this up) a woman who died with 85 million dollars. She was pretty wealthy all her life, yet when her son got sick he had to have his leg amputated because his miserly mother couldn’t find a free clinic to give him the cheap-ass medicine he needed.

She died arguing over the virtues of skim milk or cold oatmeal or something like that.

11

I’m a website designer (of sorts) and my boss back home in NZ in my last job was utterly obsessive about money.

Everything to him had some kind of monetary value, or social status. That’s all that counted.

I designed our website, which was a very simple design, with a single small animation, a design that convinced many people that we could do a fine job on their websites for them.

But being totally obsessed with any kind of expenditure, my boss wanted our own traffic costs for that site to be reduced to zero. So he removed the animation, removed some of the colours (!!!) from the pages, halved the text (so it was barely informative at all) and generally jiggered around with it all behind my back without asking my opinion so that he could get our 35k site down to 14k.

Dickhead.

He also reduced my paycheque without telling me, but that’s another story.

12

I have to admit that I am the cheapest person I know. It’s a hobby with me and I admit I’ve dived into a dumpster or two to get something I need. I’m not stingy or mean about it and wouldn’t do anything dishonest to save a buck or cheat anybody. That’s the difference between a miser and a smiling cheap-ass. I come by it honestly, both my parents are cheap and my grandparents were all tightwads. The depression, ya know. Somebody should get Shirley Ujest on this thread, she knows a thing or two about the tightwad mind.

13

My grandmother, my mother’s mother, has Alzheimer’s, and need 24-hour care. So mom and her four sisters conferred and decided to afford the very nice place she is in, it would be necessary to sell her house. The five of them would split up her furniture and jewelry to keep it all in the family and such. I wasn’t there, but according to all stories, my mom’s oldest sister was just incredibly petty, mean, and cheap. On two different occasions, Youngest Sister had stated her desire for a couple of items (a necklace and a nice display case), and on both occasions, Oldest Sister had the pick first, and selected those items. Nice, huh? It should be noted that I have NEVER been to my aunt’s house, because it is reportedly a huge mess, as she can never get rid of anything. But she has to have more. When all the expensive and sentimental items had been divvied, and only boring household items remained, Oldest Sister decided she was going to take ALL of it. She took the DUST RAGS.

There’s more, and it’s still ongoing, but I think my mom would be horrified if I related it on the web. Suffice to say, all is not goodness and light in Kyla’s family.

14

I remember this story. Her name was Hetty Something. Inherited the family business in Hartford, whaling business, I beleive. I think she was the original cat lady, by the picture they use to print of her in the GBoWR.

15

I worked with a German woman who was raised in Bremen during that fun time called the BOMBING RAIDS ON BREMEN.

She wore the same outfit for something like 25 days in a row. Too cheap to buy something nice for the office, but she had this gorgeous wardrobe that she only wore once in a great while. She actually gave me a couple of great old dresses from the 50’s that are excellent tailoring and a fake fur coat that is spectacular. But she wore the same “Eddie” the dog from Fraiser shirt over and over.

I don’t care who you are, what you do for a living or how strong your backbone is, you can never ever ever be more ruthless with money than a german who has lived during or after WW2. They are like dogs with frisbees, only the dogs never look at you like, " Oh fuck, I have to put up wif you today" I have worked with two different older krauts and married into this mentality. They wear you down until you beg them to take your dime.

Two Polly Stories:

  1. Polly was born in Germany was teenager when the entire Bombings over Bremen ( her hometown) was going on. Their family went from being very affluent to being dead broke during the war. Married a US soldier, came here, started a family and eventually opened a business.

She would stop work and interogate employees as to “who stole MY returnables”. When she would stalk over to my desk I would say, " You mean the $20.00 worth of sticky pop cans that were causing ants to infest the back room, then it was me. I bought some Raid with the money and here is your change and the receipt." Repeat this scene every few months over seven years. She always accused me of stealing her money.

  1. The Great Potato Story:
    We had a client who (for whatever reason) worked up north and would bring in a 50# bag of potatoes from this farm. Sell it to the people in our office for $5.00. When he did this, I didn’t buy them, figuring the potatoes must not be that good to begin with.Being a natural cynic pays off once in a while. Everyone who bought a bag, said most of them were yucky to begin with. Not five dollars worth of potatoes in the bag.

*Not Polly * She put this bag in our vault and would periodically take one out to eat for lunch. Periodically would be about once every five or six weeks. After well over a year, the eyes for these potatoes were higher than my head ( the last time I told this story they were as high as my shoulder. Next time, they’ll be higher.) and the room was getting a little ripe. After joking with her to get rid of them or start making vodka, and weeks pass, I decide to take the things home and throw them into my compost pile.

The next afternoon, Polly storms over to my desk ( after interogating everyone else) " Where are my potatoes?!"

I explained quite calmly, " In my compost pile. They were no good."

She produces one surviving potato that manages to not be squishy and in her mind, they are all aok. Picture General Burkhart from Hogan’s Hero’s in Drag and yelling and you have Polly, " You stole my potatoes, bring zem back!"

“They were all rotten. The bottom of the bag was soaked through from the gunk.”

“They are my potatoes. Bring zem back!”

Me, grinding my teeth, " The War is over Polly, you can well afford to buy fresh potatoes."

She stormed off and her husband of 50 years ( god rest his soul) applauded me for toeing the line with her.
I should add another one related to Polly, but it was her dear sweet husband who’s mother had passed on at age 90. ( After being kept in the shittiest nursing home in the -watch for the oxymoron - crappiest section of Detroit for the better part of 20 years and never visited on a regular basis, but I digress.) When Grandma died, the family had her cremated and too cheap to put her in an urn or even tupperware,ferchristsake, they kept her in a cardboard box. Where did they keep Grandma’s remains you ask? In our Vault. Yep, right near the potatoes.

Poor woman. She’s probably still there.

16

Hetty Green - the Witch of Wall Street. Or so she was called.

17

Not as bad as some of the stories, but when I was married, our house was paid for, both of our cars were paid for, and my husband had over 40K in the bank. He threw a fit when I bought some dye, because he already had some. (However, he would have thrown a fit if I had just used his dye, because it was his and I was supposed to ask for permission to use it :rolleyes:)

And he refused to spend $100 dollars on a session with our marriage counselor when I asked him to (which was an agreement we had made when we got married). So I got a divorce instead, which cost him about 40K :smiley:

18

I never got the full story but my Great aunt Fran was a penny pincher. When she died all of her brothers children (father and 2 aunts) got a prety penny. It was horrible how she had lived. Always bought in bulk, Went to bed at dusk to save electricity. She never went out. Penny Pinching bastards really irk me. I have run across many people who have 300,000 dollar homes who bitch about the price of lock work I preform for them. They grip and bitch for a discount yet, if I go to get an eye exam at their office do I get a discount? hell no…
<edited of all pit language>
Grrr…
Osip

19

The family always thought Aunt Amelia was well off. I don’t know if she was or not – probably no one did. But she was the widow of a farmer – and aren’t all farmers rich? :wink:

Anyway, when my grandma died, Aunt Amelia hitched a ride to the funeral (she must have been in her 80’s), and she brought a paper bag and filled it with food from the lunch after the service.

She didn’t have a sympathy card, but gave grandpa a fifty-cent piece wrapped in brown paper.

Here’s the good part (and I swear I am not making this up). Shortly after the funeral, she married a teenage boy from town. He stayed with her long enough to buy bikes for his brothers and sisters, then left. I am not kidding!

20

[hijack]Shirley, good to see you, where have you been hiding? :)[/hijack]

My story:

A friend of mine drove down to see me when I was living in Cincinnati. She had it in mind to drive from there to North Point, NC to go furniture shopping. It was a whirlwind trip, done over two days. We bought furniture and left.

At 1AM in rural Kentucky, she’s driving (we’re splitting gas, I bought on the way down, she was buying on the way back) and the gas light goes on. We get off at the next exit and she declares that the gas is too expensive and she knows she can get it cheaper somewhere else.

She gets on the freeway again and goes to the next exit five miles down the road. AGAIN, she says that it’s too expensive and says we should continue on.

At this point, I mention that the two cents per gallon she’s trying to save will amount to about $0.40, and I will gladly give her FIFTY CENTS to save our asses from being raped in a ditch off the highway.

Oh, did I mention that this was the woman, when I dropped a coin on the sidewalk, said, “That was a quarter!” without ever seeing it?