funny examples of when people have been extreme tightwads / tightfisted

[Sensisoul]

i recently fell out with a friend who is known for being exceptionally tight with money.

They have no kids & do anything to scrimp and save so they can afford a champagne lifestyle at the drop of a hat. They buy expensive beauty items with free gifts and then take the items back for a refund afterwards and not return the free gift!

This is a light hearted post about examples of tight friends, partners & family members who have either gone out of their way to be tight or given terrible birthday/ Christmas presents over the years.

NB- This isn’t a criticism on saving money, being mindful of money to stop hardship etc. It is great to collect coupons and vouchers and I do the same. It is more a lighthearted look at how tight some people can be:

Tell me what happened and when & is that person still in your life?

I’ll give a few examples:

this friend requests vouchers from people at Christmas
but always buys people “presents”. These presents can be anything from some old used nail varnish to free beauty samples sachets.

Their family now insist that they buy them gift vouchers as they no longer want their version of “presents”

Only orders hot water in a restaurant/bar- so drinks are always free. sometimes brings own tea bag and milk if they fancy a cup of tea.

Insists on walking everywhere and is spitting feathers when they share a taxi with anyone. They would sooner walk home on their own at night and potentially risk their own safety, than hail a cab and get home safely.

Order the most expensive luxury drink at a bar and then complain said drink is flat and that another fresh bottle is opened. They would then complain again and get another drink free!

Arrange to meet for lunch/dinner at the venue of their choice & then not order anything at all from the venue & say they are getting something from the burger van nearby afterwards. Then watch me eat my food that was ordered from the venue while they sip on a free cup of hot water. ( the hot water was free btw)

Insist on always getting a child’s portion at any eatery. whether this is chips
from a burger van or a posh restaurant.
This person always has to have the cheapest bill at the end of a meal.

Send a sympathy card when my auntie passed away & have the text in the card crossed out!! God knows what the original card said 😂

DP used to speak at length about which car park in town to use (none of them) but to drive to somewhere 15 mins walk away from where we were going for dinner to save 60p on parking. But then he would always pick up the bill, go further down the wine list for the better bottle and insist on cocktails.

😂😂 love it! 60p on parking 😂😂

As a dc my df would never pay for parking. Always had to walk.
Df is 90 now and can’t walk very far, he complains bitterly about taxi fares!

awww - yes my mum had a friend who “didn’t believe in taxis” I had to wait all night for 2 x buses & had a really busy week of work the next day

I went out for a meal with a group of 3 friends years ago, we were all about 16/17. The board on the door said the potato skins were £4.45.
The menu said the potato skins were £4.95. One of my friends called a waiter over to point this out and was told that the price on the board was a mistake. She had a full on argument with the manager about the price and said that none of us are happy to pay the higher price. We were all sitting quietly at the table dying of embarassment as none of us were bothered by the 50p extra.

She is one of the most tight people I've ever met. We are no longer friends (not because of how tight she was, but that was always something I hated)

That is hilarious. so funny.
yes actually- my friend always complains about the food not being right. They have been banned from
some pubs/restaurants.
It is so unnecessary and embarrassing.

God fil

Bought a door hinge I didn't even want and then asked for the £1 bak

Charged us petrol money to drive 6 miles to swap something in a shop that was actually purchased by us for them as a gift

Takes blocks of cheese on holiday in suitcase as well as bread and butter

Orders a starter as a main and shares a drink with mil so as not to pay more than a tenner out

I will never forget a lovely walk down lytham seafront when my FiL talked non stop about how much a cup of tea was in the various cafes in our home town and how he now always went to x cafe as it was cheapest. I thought that conversation was dire enough until we passed a public loo and I was treated to a run down of the cost of every public toilet in Blackpool.

they are tight arses in some ways and yet can manage to holiday and cruise multiple times a year. Although that ultimately leads to stories of how a normal coffee is ok the package but you have to pay for a latte. Reader, MIL had one latte all holiday as a treat.

A friend of mine once reminded me about 2p I owed him. TWO PENCE.

The same pil buy a starter as a main when they are paying for a meal but get three courses when we are paying. The absolute cheek.

When I was backpacking I went to a bar on an island in the pacific with a group from the hostel. The bar had a $5 door charge which was the equivalent of £2 at the time. Three of the louder girls kicked up a fuss about having to pay it and got in an argument with the doorman. The place was full of locals, most of whom wouldn't have been earning much but paid the door charge. Yet here we were, with so much money we were travelling the world and apparently expecting everything for free . I was so embarrassed I quietly left with one of the others in the group and found a new bar before they noticed and followed.

My (fairly well off!) mum used to ask for extra ketchup packets everywhere we went and take them to work in her handbag, because her office canteen charged 10p for them

I met an OLD outside a coffee shop . Before we even went inside he was very insistent that we went halves . I didn't mind paying half , but when we came to pay he produced a tray purse and hoked out the exact amount in very small change. He looked like Fagin holding this tray purse ...I was expecting to hear him start singing " we gotta pick a pocket or two". 😁

Years ago my mum was out for a walk with a guy and they passed a home bakery....he nipped in ...came out scoffing a choc eclair and said " oooh these are lovely, you should get yourself one"

I had a very frugal friend. The sort who rinses and reuses paper towels until they fall apart. I didn’t mind because we both liked hunting for bargains in charity shops and having someone who understood the joy of great funds.

She never wanted to eat out, always at home. We’d often stop at mine for coffee, chat and some biscuits or cake (I bake too). One day, she invited me to hers for dinner and a film. After we’d eaten salad followed by a main of salmon and veg, I helped her with the clearing up. She took our salad bowls and poured the excess salad dressing back into the salad dressing bottle. I must have had a look on my face because I felt physically ill realising that I’d probably just eaten re-used salad dressing. So she said grumpily that it’s wasteful to just wash away left over salad dressing and the vinegar kills everything anyway.

I never ate at her house again and I think that moment is when our friendship died.

Dh’s old aunt - aka Queen Midas - was notoriously mean with money, despite having plenty.

She was a keen knitter and I still cringe to remember the argument in a small wool shop when she was buying some expensive mohair yarn that cost about £12.14p.

She wanted the 14p knocked off the price, and the poor woman behind the counter tried for several minutes to explain that wasn’t her shop so she didn’t have the right to do it.
I wanted the floor to swallow me up!

Plus her long suffering cleaning lady would often do her shopping for her - no extra pay! - and would then be moaned at because she hadn’t gone to a different shop for the butter, where it was literally 1p cheaper.

I’m pleased to say that after she died, dh and his brothers made a Deed of Variation to her will, in order to send a nice fat cheque to Long-Suffering Cleaning Lady - who of course had been left nothing. Might add that MiL had always told Dh and his DBs never to expect anything, because, ‘She’ll find a way to take it with her.’

Being a home help years ago I came across many people who were "frugal" and that's putting it kindly!!
Worst one was using the same teabag for about 15 cups of tea. I got a thorough telling off for throwing away a teabag after only 3 uses and was instructed to retrieve it from the bin for further use 🤣

My partner can be a bit like this. I take the piss out of him for it. He knows exactly what things cost in different shops and will go to 3 or 4 different ones so as not to over pay for butter or whatever by a few pence. I think it’s mad. He’ll also often just order tap water if we go out for food. I order a cocktail to compensate!

when people take it to the extreme like your ex friend OP, I think it becomes obsessive to the point of mental illness. Such a joyless existence.

Many years ago I shared house with a CHinese buy, this is relevant because he would say all Chinese people were tight with money and he wasn't.

We'd sometimes get a pizza delivered. At the time it was £9.99

He gave me a fiver, I answered the door and gave the guy £10.

The next time the same thing happened but when I came back in with the pizza he asked for the 1p because he'd paid it last time. 1p!

My mum would order from M and S, under a certain amount you have (or had to pay postage) so she would order extra things to get free delivery and then take the extra n to town by car, park up, walk to M and S and 'return' the item she didn't want in the first place. I'm sure it cost as much to return things as it would have to pay postage.

DH & I were at a friend's after dropping him off. He went to put the kettle on & we chatted to his partner. He shouted through that there were no biscuits so she asked if we wanted some chocolate. When we said yes please she went to a basket full of chocolate bars on the sideboard, picked up one Yorkie bar & broke it into chunks. Then offered us one piece each!
They are not hard up.

I have a cousin who gets her calculator out to work out what slices of shared garlic bread costs and then only pays 'her share'.

However she is also extremely good at asking for chips off other people's plates or asking to 'try' some of their pudding. No suggestion she gets her calculator out for that. I pissed her off once when she reached over and took a handful of chips from my DS1's (aged about 2 at the time) bowl. I asked her to please not steal food from my child. To be fair to myself chips were the only things he ate (he has sensory issues) when out and also I was very pissed off at the sight of her little calculator.

Arrange to meet for lunch/dinner at the venue of their choice & then not order anything at all from the venue & say they are getting something from the burger van nearby afterwards. Then watch me eat my food that was ordered from the venue while they sip on a free cup of hot water. ( the hot water was free btw)
I hope she didn't then decide she was hungry, and offer to share your meal?

@Lobelia, one of my pet hates is people who oh-so-virtuously don’t order chips or pudding, but then want to nick some of yours!

Having said that, it’s not unknown for me and dh to order one pudding with two spoons. Not out of tightness, but because we’re full, but still fancy something nice anyway.

I once went out with someone who was quite well off and liked to be seen as incredibly generous but was secretly (or so he thought) incredibly tight. Each year at Xmas he went to Costco and bought a cheap bulk pack of something then gave each friend/family member one as a present, claiming it was from somewhere special. Eg. cheap jars of jam that he made a big thing of telling each person he'd found in a high end farm shop on his travels and thought of that person and how much they liked nice jam. His sister told me that they all knew what he was up to, and used to try to guess what that year's story would be.

He also used to buy huge sacks of really cheap carrots that were sold for horses etc and use them to cook with.

I had a work friend who when we went out as a group always ordered ‘just soup’ but then helped herself to everyone’s chips (in huge amounts). Having quickly realised this, the next time we went out as a large group we had ordered the food ahead (to make sure we were back to work in time) and worked out who had ordered chips and they all sat at the far end of the table. The sheer frustration on her face when the food arrived and she couldn’t reach out and grab any!!!! I’d feel bad but when anyone was paying she ordered the full 3 courses and a glass of wine.

I received a pair of pyjamas shorts - just the shorts, no top - from a close relative for my birthday. They were too small, so I went to the shop they were from the following day to see if I could exchange them.

Anyway, woman on the till asked, is there anything you have done to offend this person?? Turns out she had paid the sum of 10p for my birthday gift! It was off a ‘final sale rack’. The woman could see the price tracking of the item and when it had sold.

This person regularly bought really super random gifts for other close relatives - think TK Maxx random sale shelf rack sort of items - like buying a refill for an item which the receiver wouldn’t have had the actual item requiring the refill.

No financial issues with the relative - absolutely minted, massive house, new cars every 6 months, designer clothes of which they would buy items in every colour way etc etc. Just really tight with everyone else!