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 😂

I quite like the idea that your dad somehow dropped the 2p for a bit of a laugh. 🙃

I have an extremely tight relative. He makes a huge virtue of getting the cheapest clapped-out appliances from Freecycle etc, traipsing round car boot sales and charity shops for clothes, buying supermarket value products, eking out the last scrape of toothpaste etc etc.

On their own, these are just money saving strategies and absolutely fine if money is really tight. But that's not the case. He has no mortgage, loads of savings and thinks nothing of spending thousands on gadgets for his hobby. But he's conditioned his (female) partner (who also has to use the clapped out washing machine etc) into believing that spending money on herself is self indulgent and greedy.

Sexist, entitled assholery at its finest.

wow everyone! what a laugh you have given me this afternoon. So many great anecdotes here! Thank you for such a giggle.
It has made me realise there are plenty of tight-wadded people around indeed and you have made me howl with laughter 😂😂

Thanks-
Have a great weekend.
xx

not any more friends- I tolerated it for a while but I’ve had enough now lol

From what I can recall (it was a good 20+ years ago), yeah he did. I remember him shrugging and insisting over and over that it didn't have to be water and it wasn't that that caused the engine to fail. I don't really know what came of the whole thing. I hope they made him pay the repairs though.

I once went out for dinner with a big group of work colleagues. It was the type of restaurant where you just order loads of bits to share so the bill should have been split equally.

When it came, I added a bit on for a tip (as there were around 20 of us) and told everyone they owed £17. When the bill got to the last guy at the table he asked the waiter how much was left to pay. As everyone had slightly overpaid to account for the tip, he ended up paying about £2.50 for his meal and the poor waiter was left with no tip!

I didn’t realise what had happened until later so didn’t say anything but we never invited him out with us again.

I also once went out for dinner with my dad and his partner who he lived with at the time (in her house rent free). At the end of the meal he paid and she wrote him a cheque in the middle of the restaurant for her share. I must have only been about 10 but remember thinking I would never be with a man who wouldn’t pay for my dinner.

FIL is notoriously tight. Too many examples for here. But we took him & his wife out for a birthday meal on us. Very nice place, fantastic services, brilliant food, they made a fuss of him. The bill was over £200 but we'd had a great night.

Getting ready to pay the bill & leave FIL said he'd cover the tip. He got his wallet out and put a twenty pence piece on the table! We gave it him back & put the tip in ourselves.

I had a friend was incredibly tight. There were 4 of us who would regularly go out for when were in our 20s, early 30s. Where were all in a similar financial position but she would do her utmost to avoid buying a round of drinks by being late, saying she was really hungry so could we go for food now etc. I realised she was excellent at taking the money the rest of us had left as a tip for her change so pulled her up on it and she got all of saying she hadn't realised. Yeah right. Another time, a barbecue at one of the others houses, we all said we'd bring something, she brought one veggie sausage. She's friends with one of the others still but myself and the other friend aren't as we just had enough.

Aaargh posted instead of preview! Too many typos. Sorry

Maybe they have all this money because they don't waste it..

Yes, but there's wasting money, and there's being a CF and expecting other people to pay for you.

MIL treated us to a meal out for FIL's birthday.

FIL invited us all to a meal out for her birthday, and paid on the day. But secretly messaged my husband (but not his brother) asking him to pay our share.

Their house is expensively refurbished every few years, and they always have pricey lease cars. We have a regular, ten year old car that he rudely told me needed updating.

He spends money where people can see it and is a tight git otherwise.

@lurker69 I don't remember but apparently when I was about 5, my cousins dad took us for a day out. To us he was old but he was actually a broke uni student. He put petrol in the car that morning then on the way home later on. I asked him 'why did you pay 1p more per ltr for petrol in this shop' 😂I like to think I have grown up not to be a stingy person!!

I've said it on here before, I went inter-railing with a friend and a absolute stinge bag. He kept 'forgetting' his wallet/ couldn't cash travellers chq's who even has those! Bought him loads of food/ drinks until we got sick of it and told him go back to the hostel to find his wallet. Leaving Hungary for another country he went to the shop for all of us, he came back I was short about 5p for a large bottle of water. He said I needed to withdraw more money there (Which wouldn't be useful in the next country!!) I told him to get me the water!!

@iklboo like did he actually think that was an acceptable tip? I'll never forget someone handing me 20c as a tip when I waitressed in uni, which is years ago and I haven't forgotten!! It was a pub/restaurant so sometimes ppl would leave whatever change was given to them on the table. This person handed me 20c and looked like they did me a favour. I was so insulted!!! That was what they thought I was worth. BTW most ppl did not leave tips, that was not insulting 20c was.

Christmas at work, there was talks of ordering Christmas dinners in and it costing us £5 each. We'll call him Steve, said he doesn't want a dinner as 2 days later he's having an actual Christmas dinner so didn't want 2 dinners in one week (🙄) I said stop being a tight arse it's cos you don't want to spend a fiver, he insisted it's not because of that. So dinner day rolls round & someone rings in sick so there's a spare dinner and it's offered to Steve, Steve jumps at the opportunity to have this dinner, because it meant he got it and didn't have to pay £5 for it.. tight arse!

Used to live abroad and came home once a year to see family. Couldn't stay wit Dad, and my sister lived round the corner from him in a big house, no kids, but did not ask me to stay there. Went to stay with friend in next town. I got the bus most days from friend's house to visit my dad, and dutifully visited said sister (where I was occasionally offered a cup of tea, never a meal or anything more). One day I realised I was going to miss the bus back to friend's for dinner, so asked sister if I could use her phone (long before mobiles). She frostily said 'as long as it's a local call', knowing full well that my friend lived just a few miles away. I soon gave up trying to keep that going so we have been NC for a long time. Have never forgotten those words. Miserable tight-fisted bitch, hope she's happy in her old age with her money.

Oh that's awful- I could never eat there again, or even have a drink. That says something about a person.

When I was a teacher, we had a staff social fund. Everyone paid £12 a year and it covered leaving presents, leaving cake and a buffet and drinks in the staffroom at the end of each term. There were 3 men on the staff- all Heads of Department, all in their 40s and 50s- who refused to contribute on the basis that it paid for presents for people they would not buy presents for. They were first in the staffroom every end of term to get the buffet and drinks and were furious when the person in charge of the fund said they had to contribute £4.50 a year if they expected to come to the buffets.

I will hold my hand up to pointing out to a lady on the till the other day that she had charged me 25p too much, she had the cheek to ask me if i wanted her to rectify it ! Yes i bloody well did !

SIL asks for all manner of expensive things (perfume that starts at £80 for the smallest eau de toilette bottle, on offer in Boots, for example) for their herself, expensive stuff for her family, or offers no sensible suggestions.

She ignores our requests why did you phone to ask exactly? even though we pick reasonable-budget gifts that are easy to buy from a supermarket. Our actual gifts would be random re-gifts she messed up and gave me MIL's gift to her from the year before - I know because MIL got us the same, or from whatever MLM shite she was pushing this time. Yes thanks for the Usbourne book of little girls dress-up nonsense as you're doing Usbourne that is about 4 years too young and 100% too pink for my dragon-mad, upper primary-aged DDs.

The worst was when I worked 2 jobs. Main job at the HQ of a restaurant company, and part time job 2 in one of the restaurants, where I'd been promoted from and my then boyfriend worked. Our HQ dept went for a meal there, and paid the bill to the penny with no tip despite the best waitress in the place giving us amazingly attentive service - and we worked in the bloody industry! I loitered and quickly dropped extra before leaving the table, in effect tripling the cost of my meal. From then I encouraged meals out for our Dept to be at other places.

Also, when I was Deputy Head, I went into the loos late one night when I was working about 6pm and found the Head of Health and Social Care filling a shopping bag with loo rolls from the pile the cleaner kept in there. She was very embarrassed and put them back without saying a word. I asked the cleaner the next morning to put them in her cupboard from then on and went to speak to the member if staff to say if she was caught taking anything again it would be regarded as stealing and treated as that. She scowled at me and had a huff. She was from a wealthy family in Ireland - own a huge house in Londonderry and she is spoilt rotten by her parents- and was earning £48,000. Stealing loo roll from a school!

My BIL used to do that after he and his wife complained about some minor detail to get a discount.

I once called him on it by saying 'it's x amount otherwise they will lose their tip we've already paid' got a telling off from MIL for embarrassing him and haven't eaten out with them since! He is always telling us how much money he has but rarely gets his round and always adds his coffee/ice cream order on as we buy one for MIL/FIL.