Cheap-O

Author’s Note:  By a stroke of fate, today’s post is aptly dedicated to my dear friend and accountant extraordinaire, Kevin.  Kevin is a prince of a guy- a numbers genius who tirelessly negotiates the labyrinth of the tax code on behalf of his clients.  He is definitely NOT a Cheap-O.  He’s just fiscally prudent.

Happy birthday, you old sea wolf.  And now back to our regularly scheduled program. (Hey, isn’t that an accountant pun?)

How do you feel about money?  I know.  That’s a personal question.  But come on.  You can tell me.  Do you like to spend it?  Hoard it?  Waste it? Save it for a rainy day?  Blow it all on a drunken spree?

I think about this because my two kids were born with diametrically-opposed economic views.  And the subject has fascinated me ever since.

Natasha was a Hetty Green wannabe.  She came out of the womb clutching a passbook in one hand and a certificate of deposit in the other.

True Story:  When she was nine she insisted that she had discovered an unfavorable mistake in aforesaid passbook made by the good folks at Winnetka Bank.  I pooh-poohed it.

“Natasha, banks never make mistakes.” (Ahem.  This was in the carefree era that had never heard of Barclays’s interest-rigging debacle, the JPMorgan Chase’s $2 billion trading misstep, and HSBC’s $1.9 billion money-laundering scandal.)

“Well, they made one this time, Mom.  A BIG one.  They owe me eight dollars.”

I knew better than to argue with her.  (New readers see October 14 post “Whirlybird.“)  So I dutifully drove her to the bank for an audit of their books.  The bank guy looked at her skeptically but he listened politely.  And three days later we had our answer.

“We had to go all the way back to microfiche, Mrs. Ross,” he reported.  “But there was, in fact, a mistake.  And we have duly credited Natasha’s savings account with eight dollars. By the way, I thought you’d like to know.  The search cost us a hundred.”

My Little Miss Miser felt it was money well spent.  She just loves her clawback.

Nick, on the other hand, was a born big-spender.  Give both my kids twenty dollars at Christmas and a year later, Natasha’s would have accrued interest.  Nick would take that same twenty and plunk it down on some very expensive toy.  He had possession of it all of ten minutes (the time it would take him to talk me into driving him to the Village Toy Shop) and already he would be in a monetary hole as deep as Jamie Dimon.

Their opposite fiscal cliff policies showed up all the time.  One camp visiting weekend, we landed in Maine, and in the time-honored tradition of camp parents everywhere, their father and I took the kids out for the mandatory annual lunch at McDonald’s/L.L. Bean visit.

This particular July day was 100 in the shade in Freeport- only there wasn’t any shade.  In the interest of efficiency, we split the kids between us.  He got Nick.  I took Natasha.  We agreed to meet up two hours later at some ice cream shack.

Natasha had seen a white t-shirt that she liked at one store.  It cost ten dollars.  Then, way across Freeport, she spotted another contender.  This one had a pocket and cost twelve dollars.  For two hours, in the one hundred degree remorseless heat of sun-baked Maine, she walked me back and forth and back and forth to check and re-check on these friggin’ shirts.  And which one did she ended up buying?  The ten dollar plain one or the twelve dollar pocket version?  (With her father’s credit card in either case.)

Neither.  That’s right.  Neither.  She decided that she didn’t really need a new t-shirt after all.

Don’t worry.  Our budget still balanced.

When we all met up at the ice cream store, Diamond Jim had talked his father into a $300 boogie board.  So thus the laws of supply (the surf shop’s inventory) and demand (Nick’s never-ending insatiable quest for the right stuff.  As a toddler, he used to sit in front of the television and scream, “I want that!” at every commercial.  Including Tampax.) still held its center.

Natasha wanted me to be frugal, too.  She didn’t like it when I appeared to be over-spending.  Or just spending.  Whenever we took a mother-daughter trip her favorite mantra was “Don’t touch the mini bar! ”

Whenever I bought her underwear and sent it on to boarding school, I always had to enclose a note that said “Don’t worry. There was a two-for-one sale.”  I got plenty of strange looks from the sales girls, believe me. (I would always explain that such largesse would be returned untouched if Natasha thought that I had paid full price.)

“And this is a teen-aged girl we are talking about?” they would check as they wrapped it up and marked it “ship.”  Yep, a teen-aged girl with the soul of Warren Buffett.  Natasha liked to see her money snowballing.

She believed in self-parking- even in free valet lots.  And once, when she had a summer job in the city and commuted by train, I picked her up at the Winnetka station at the end of a very long slog.  She didn’t look so great and was in a foul mood.

“Hard day at the office, dear?” I enquired sweetly of my little commuter.

“I’m tired,” she snapped. “And hot.”

“Wasn’t the train air-conditioned?  Did it go out?” I asked concerned now.

“No, it didn’t go out.  I didn’t want to pay extra for the special seating.”

My financial sympathies lie much more with Nick.  I’m a “drinks are on me” guy.  I believe it is more blessed to give than to receive- and a hell of a lot more fun.

But the miser, hoarder, careful, cheap- what ever you want to call it- mentality holds a certain fascination for me.  I find it amusing.  And I love to collect examples of truly  outrageous skinflint behavior wherever I can.

For instance:  I had one (very well-off) beau who could never pick up a dinner check without flinching and screaming “FOR WHAT?!!” when he looked at it.  Every single time.  He and I soon parted- and I bet he wasn’t sorry to see me go on my merry grasshopper way, either.

My father, the sweetest, most generous dad ever sometimes ran smack up against his own Depression-era mentality and caved.  Many years ago, a deli here put out a televised APB that a salmonella outbreak had invaded its corned beef.  People were cautioned over and over that if they happened to have any of this tainted foodstuff to eight-six it pronto.  Public health depended on it.

My dad happened to have some of this selfsame “poisoned” lunch meat still hanging around.  And…yep, you guessed.  He ate it.  After the warning went out.

(When asked to explain this suicidal behavior, he sheepishly replied that “it still looked okay and I didn’t want to waste it.”)

Or what about the guy who hauled his own pre-filled-with-tap-water bottles to Africa?  Do you know how much they weighed?  And what if one had broken in his suitcase?  Couldn’t he have just sprung for the bottled water once he got there?

And I heard a specious rumor that one senior citizen lifetime cheapskate makes his wife wash out and recycle used garbage liners!  I don’t know if it’s true but if it is, that’s what I call really getting your money’s worth out of two kinds of old bags.

(I know that I can tease these guys with impunity.  If they are anything like Natasha, they are proud of their penny-pinching.  They think they have gamed the system.  And they think folks like Nick and me are suckers and fools.)

But I hereby nominate one character for the Ebenezer Scrooge Miser Hall of Fame.

Did you hear the one about the guy who tried to back out of a Florida toll booth because he was too cheap to pay the the one dollar toll?  The toll booth attendant had to tell him no dice- and no backing up.  They were at a stalemate until the poor guy riding shotgun with this tightwad finally paid the buck himself to end the contretemps.

We all know people like Wrong Way Corrigan here.  Can you top that?  Nominees for the Hall anyone? (Anonymous entries only.  Let’s play nice.)  The ballots are now open.

And Natasha Buffett will be the judge.