What is the stingiest thing you've ever done / seen someone do?

[Teadrinker11]

Yourself or someone else, what is the most stingy, mean, miserable thing is that you have ever done or seen someone else do?

My mum came from a big family and we were frequently visited by, and went to visit aunts and uncles for lunch etc. One of my aunts was noted for using cheap margarine and sparse fillings on her guests sandwiches, while using butter on her own, which were considerably fuller !! This was early seventies so I’m not talking about the sophisticated low fat spreads we have these days - think Stork and Echo block margarine !!

Ex father in law used to swap the eggs in a medium box for large ones in the supermarket.

I had just started a new job and always remember this one lady who loudly said “I don’t believe in charity” when a collection went round for Children In Need.

It was just such an odd statement to make.
I was like
She also never used to add money to peoples birthday/ leaving collections, despite people doing one for her birthday each year. She was very tight (no, she wasn’t hard up for cash, she used to brag about her expensive taste in clothes/shoes etc) and a joyless person to be around.

I didn’t add any money to her collection when she left 2 years later I thought ‘sod that’

[quote hivemindneeded]@BlowDryRat - I'm ashamed to say I didn't really think that through. Thank you for explaining.[/quote]
The only reason I thought about it is because I used to go camping at a site that allowed open fires but only with wood bought from their shop, for this reason.

Not stingy, more frugal:

Where I live and through my work I "know" (by which I mean if I saw her out and about she'd say "Hello Cavemum" to me but we're not buddies!) a very wealthy woman - I'm talking "Top 20 Sunday Times Rich List" wealthy.

She's lovely and every now and then I see her in Tesco perusing the marked down items at the end of the day! She drives a battered old car (it's an F-reg) on a day to day basis though I'm sure she has a "posh" car when she's travelling more than 10 miles from her home!

I knew a lady who had 1 item at a time scanned and paid for each item separately.
This was to save money with “round down”. In Aus, if something costs .77 cents, It gets rounded down to 75 cents.

@8lue8ird

Ex father in law used to swap the eggs in a medium box for large ones in the supermarket.

That's not stingy it's theft, and buggers someone else up when they need large eggs and get medium.

@Yellownotblue

Some years ago my DH went to a tennis championship final (not Grand Slam but next category down - recent winners include Federer Djokovic Nadal Zverev etc) with my friend’s DH who is a tennis fanatic. He is also unbelievably tight. Tickets to the event cost about US$100. Friend’s DH brought his own packed lunch so he wouldn’t spend any money at the catering venues. So DH had to eat alone in the restaurant. 🙄.

Food in those kinds of places are always inflated and normally terrible

Why wouldn't you take your own food

This will be long! I’m still angry about it all these years later!

Both my sister and sil can be really stingy in the sense they will do anything to get out of paying.
My sister is more of the chancer variety whereas sil is deliberately nasty with it. On this occasion I was frankly gobsmacked.

It was just after Christmas so me and dh were skint. Sil wanted to come down and visit for a few particular days (had to be those days, couldn’t be the week later when we’d been paid!) Anyway we agreed as long as she was aware we wouldn’t be hosting and while she was welcome to eat the meals I was cooking I couldn’t afford to buy in anything special for her.

She turns up late evening and wants us all to get a takeaway. We feel put on the spot and explain the previous mentioned lack of funds and that we can’t afford to buy her food. She says no worries and she will pay for her own food. Me and dh had about £14 so we thought ok me and him will share a meal. Chinese portions tend to be massive and we had enough food in to cover the next few days until payday.

Sil decides to order two meals because she likes the look of both, ok fine. Me and dh order a main and a rice to share. Our usual Chinese (with big portions!) is closed so we try somewhere else.

So the food arrives and sil goes to give the money for hers and she’s short... by about £5! She is completely unapologetic and looks at us as if to say you’ll have to sort it. We eventually manage to cobble it together through the change from our meal and ds’s piggy bank. I was not happy as I was hoping to have a few pound spare in case we ran out of bread and milk.

When we get the food out we discover the portions from this restaurant are tiny. It’s not the end of the world but there wasn’t enough to really feed both me and dh but we will have to make do. Sil opens her two meals and decides she likes the look of what we’ve ordered and asks if she can try a bit. She then proceeds to scrape around a quarter of our meal onto her plate along with her two meals! I wish I could say that I’m surprised but this is pretty typical behaviour for her. Then to add insult to injury dh asks if he can try a bit of one of her meals and she puts the smallest bit of chicken she can find on his plate. Absolutely unbelievable!

I always really wonder what drives people like that - not those working to a budget but the very well-off who object to spending literally pennies. Does it not occur to them that, when they die, they will leave behind them exactly the same as will a homeless person on the streets: everything?

My DGM was like this - squeezing left over soap together, a little device to squeeze out the last bit of toothpaste, hated to put the heating on because of the cost (god knows what she'd have thought of the current situation!), always claiming poverty when she actually had quite a tidy sum tucked away. I have her sewing box, lots of zips and buttons removed from old clothes. She reused wrapping paper as well and ate some weird meals rather than just buying something proper - or using something from her stockpile of tins.

But she grew up in poverty and lived through WWII and rationing.

@OssieShowman

I knew a lady who had 1 item at a time scanned and paid for each item separately. This was to save money with “round down”. In Aus, if something costs .77 cents, It gets rounded down to 75 cents.

I loved the round down and round up quirk in Oz when we were there last! What a fabulous country. Sigh. How I wish i lived there!

@NewMessageFrom I do this as some events in the summer have lovely picnic areas and I find queuing for food while I could be watching a waste of time

@CaveMum

Not stingy, more frugal:

Where I live and through my work I "know" (by which I mean if I saw her out and about she'd say "Hello Cavemum" to me but we're not buddies!) a very wealthy woman - I'm talking "Top 20 Sunday Times Rich List" wealthy.

She's lovely and every now and then I see her in Tesco perusing the marked down items at the end of the day! She drives a battered old car (it's an F-reg) on a day to day basis though I'm sure she has a "posh" car when she's travelling more than 10 miles from her home!

I know one exceptionally wealthy person who's a little like this - I think it's part of why they become and stay rich. checks every single item on a restaurant bill, screeches the car over if he spots a good price for something on a roadside stall, delighted to find a bargain at the market (think clothes, leather goods etc)

@TheDogsMother

Well I didn't think it was stingy I was berated by the decorator I was making a cup of tea for because I used the teabag to make two cups. Both his and mine at the same time, not reusing later.

I do this all the time simply because I drink my tea very weak, literally dunk a teabag for 15 seconds!

I wonder if a lot of this 'stingy' behaviour is in single behaviour who have no-one to temper their tendencies?

One sibling is reasonably well-off (paid off mortgage and probably only spends 1/3 of what they earn annually) but will park up to a mile away from a venue to not have to pay for parking which they can more than afford! I do think it's also a ploy to get in their 10K daily footstep count too though.

Have to say that I wouldn't regard myself as stingy but I will ensure that I don't waste anything unnecessarily, if only to offset the wasteful habits of certain family members! I can't stand finding something new started when there's still stuff to use in the already opened one (toothpaste, shampoo, cleansing products). It's as much if not more to do with space-saving (not having two receptacles out at once cluttering up surfaces) as anything else!

I also recall a short story (Italian I think) where a miser makes a note in his little notebook every time he saves money, such as "Didn't give anything to a beggar - saved 2 pennies" and "Walked into town instead of taking bus - saved sixpence" .

When I was a teenager my Dad's girlfriend at the time used to go through his ashtray and take a pair of scissors to his fag ends (roll ups with no filters) and put the leftover tobacco into a new paper to roll up. It smelt grim and used to make me feel quite sick

I don't know whether to class this as stingy or not but it's certainly selfish, popped to the supermarket last night and had a quick look at the reduced shelf as a good time of day to pick up the odd bargain, nothing there so went to the checkout. I stood behind a well dressed and very well spoken man in his 60's buying 8 heavily reduced and very large (would easily feed a family of 4 for 2-3 days, maybe more) joints of beef, he'd completely cleared the shelf. This was on top of lots of other reduced items. He then said to the cashier that he wasn't entirely sure what he was going to do with it all as he only had a small fridge with an ice box in the top so didn't have anywhere to put them but he said he couldn't leave them there at that price! I've no problem with anybody picking up bargains, but to take the lot just to waste is awful! The cashier and I were both I walked past him getting into his top of the range '71 plate high end luxury car on the way back to my car

My best friend is a multi millionaire and she drives a 16 year old bashed up banger of a car. i complimented her on her jumper last week and she aaid 'Thanks! It was from tesco!'.

But it is because she does not value cars or clothes. She never lets me pay for a meal out, she gives lovely gifts to the kids and pre-Covid times took us all for a week away in Spain just because she wanted us to come too. She's amazingly generous, but spends on what she values and saves on what she does not. The horrid car is quite incongrous though

(TBH, i think people never realise just how rich she and her DH are though and I suspect that is how she likes it).

I did that to asdas self checkout machines, a few 5p, 2p, 1p, then after around £5 of loose change the machine was starting to jam and it had to be opened up.

I took a temporary Christmas job in retail. The shop was in a pretty deprived area. I was next to the Coinstar machine. Many of the people who used it had obviously saved their change all year to pay for a big Christmas shop. No way they could put all that in the self serve.

I think the lesson is not to wait until you have enough change to fill a wheelbarrow! If you use it up each trip, it's not a problem - plus you can always put in 68p (or whatever) and then pay the rest by card.

I still think it's massively cheeky of them to give you a 'guideline' of how much you can get from a certain sized bag, but they include £1 and £2 coins in them - how are they 'spare change'? Maybe it's just my interpretation, but their advertising seems to work on the 'understanding' that spare change is basically useless 'leftovers' that thy can magically and munificently make into something valuable again!

I do feel for those in the deprived areas who have saved it up all year. It's the same principle as Farepak (and similar companies that are still going), where they make out they're helping you to save and make your money go further, when they're actually exploiting the poorest people by taking commission on their meagre savings and/or forcing you to buy from their catalogue, without being able to shop around and find more competitive prices. Vultures, really.

A friend on moving day, caught her dh removing lightbulbs. She made him put them back.

It's precisely because of people like him that fixtures and fittings forms now tell you that you must leave lightbulbs. It's almost embarrassing for the rest of us that they need to spell it out. It's a really nasty thing do: for maybe £20 worth of bulbs (even swap them for the cheapest ones you can find, if you must, as long as they work) in the context of hundreds of thousands for a house sale.

Your buyers (maybe with children) arrive at their new home, hugely busy unloading and all the associated work, it starts to get dark, they have to find time to go out to buy bulbs in an area where they may not yet know where the shops are or what kind of bulbs they need. It might sound smart but it's actually such a cruel thing to do.

House share in London, we'd often get a pizza delivered that was £9.99.

I took £5 off my housemate and gave the delivery guy £10. The next time my housemate said, "I paid £5 last time, so it's my turn for the change"

So that means that, when you paid, you would hand over a tenner yourself and wait there for him to give you a penny change? Or did you not bother, but housemate assumed you would?

I have posted this before but a man i know used to have only one light bulb in his entire house. He took it from room to room as he needed to. He was an accountant on a good wage, just extremely stingy.

What is it with misers and lightbulbs?! He can't have been a very good accountant, as he would have realised that, overall, he wasn't saving himself a single penny for all of his efforts.

A bulb in each room - whilst a slightly higher initial outlay - would in total last for the same amount of time as one bulb moved around and in constant use. In fact, it's often the electric surges caused by constantly switching on and off that artificially shorten a bulb's life, so all of those extra spikes quite possibly ended up costing him more.

I agree with PP that avoiding waste is a very good thing (I also didn't see why eating 14 eggs instead of deliberately wasting them was a mean thing to do) - when the only 'loser' from your actions is the bin/landfill. The problem is when you expect your little gains to come at the expense of others and quite often step firmly into theft and/or fraud territory.

Pressing the last slivers of soap into a new bar or using your ragged old pants as cleaning cloths to save money is a wise use of resources; effectively (or actually) reaching into somebody's purse and stealing a tenner in no way counts as 'saving' it.

An ex of mine used to get really pissy if we had friends over and they wanted to charge their phones.

He'd be nice to them about it in the moment but then moan to me about it for ages later.

@tulips27

I was at a funeral where no-one donated! The undertakers felt so bad that one of them made a donation just so there was one.

So did you not donate either?

We went to a cafe with ex in laws, we all stood up to leave and while we were putting our coats on my MIL went around the tables and swigged back all the dregs of milk out of the milk jugs. That's just the first thing that comes to mind, there are rafts of incidents like this. Nothing like getting your money's worth

@squashyhat

I guess this was a product of memories of wartime shortages but I remember when I was a child my Dad would stick the tiny sliver of old soap onto a new bar rather than throw it away. I now get really irritated with my DH for throwing away the dregs of a shampoo bottle rather than turn it upside down and squeezing it into the new one so Dad must have passed on his parsimonious habits

My mum did this, as did a lady of a similar age who I worked with in a completely different part of the world.

Then when liquid hand soap arrived Mum would often refill the dispenser with washing up liquid.

I bought myself a toothpaste tube squeezer (apparently endorsed by Prince Charles) to get the last of the toothpaste out but unfortunately it broke fairly quickly.

@RedBeetroot12

Big no-no from me too! Ye-uck, who wants pi55y tea !

Me!

@tulips27

I was at a funeral where no-one donated! The undertakers felt so bad that one of them made a donation just so there was one.

May be not then. I wouldn't.

I make my donations later on line when the charity can also benefit from the gift aid.