DH and I have just returned from a visit to his aunt's house, 300 miles away. She asked us to visit. She's in her sixties, widowed, but young and active. She lives in a house with no mortgage that she's just accepted an offer of £650k on, and has a generous pension to live on.
That sets the financial scene. My problem with her is that she always expects me and DH to pay for everything and it drives me mad.
When she visits us, and she tends to invite herself, she always wants to go out for dinner and drinks, and expects us to pay. This summer, she came for a week and we gave her dinner - cooked or paid for by us - every night, plus nice lunches and plenty of wine etc. and she never even offered to pay for coffees in a cafe.
However, when we visit her, she never reciprocates. She expects us to take her out to a restaurant, presumably to thank her for her hospitality (although she invites us and we go to please her...she's a nice woman, but it's quite an undertaking visiting her, plus she keeps her house bl**dy freezing, so it's not very comfortable).
We've just returned from one such visit. We were only staying one night, but she'd booked a restaurant and had decided that we'd be going for cocktails first. At the bar, we ordered (the aunt is the 'hang back at the bar' type), then when the bartender told us how much the round was she started fumbling around for pound coins and saying, "How much will mine be?", so to save embarrassment we just paid (£25 for three cocktails). I thought, surely she'll pay for dinner? However, after we'd eaten, she said, "how much is mine?". Not only that, we had a discount voucher for the restaurant - Loch Fyne, to give you an idea of price - and she insisted on seeing the calculations, even though my husband said that it would be about £40. I'd told him before that on no account were we paying for his aunt again, and that we should let her pay, which he accepted reluctantly. Her share was more than £40, but she said that she'd just put £40 on her card, AND she let us leave the tip!!
I was really annoyed, although I couldn't show it. I've started thinking of her as Aunt Sponge (James and the Giant Peach, if you don't get the reference!) because I think she's a shameless sponger. She clearly expected us to pay for her, and didn't seem able to contemplate actually paying for our dinner for once.
It's putting me off visiting her again. Just to reiterate, she is not at all short of money. She's about to downsize, releasing £250k, and was boasting about the £30k kitchens she's been looking at for the new house. She also goes on lots of lavish holidays.
Am I being unreasonable to think that this woman is simply tight?? I wouldn't dream of asking somebody to travel hundreds of miles to visit me then expecting them to pay for their own dinner, let alone mine too!