My parents were quite stingy. We had plenty of money when I was growing up but they never wanted to spend any of it. Family vacations were almost always to places within driving distance and we stayed at budget motels. More extravagant vacations were done in conjunction with my dad's business trips in order to defray a portion of the travel and hotel expenses. The destinations were researched in advance and itineraries would be drawn up to ensure that no moment of the vacation would be wasted. Each day we had to be up by 7 AM.

The biggest vacation we ever took was to Disney World, and it was on this trip that stinginess was taken to a new low. There was a timeshare nearby which offered Disney vouchers (used to pay for food at the parks) to anyone that came to listen to a sales pitch. Obviously, our family had no interest in timeshares in Florida, because that would cost money. But of course we went to the sales pitch anyway, trading an entire morning of an expensive vacation just to save a few bucks on food.

In my strange foreign country we outlawed the penny about a decade ago. Our pennies are (usually) worth slightly less than American pennies.

We also have dollar and 2 dollar coins, so of course the homeless ask for them as they're now spare change. I'm too stingy to give a homeless guy even a quarter so I just laugh.

So you just posted that you laugh at homeless people. Good job. You’re an amazing person.

My brother has a really disdainful attitude towards people who are homeless in Australia and thinks with the welfare system we have there is no reason for it. He is quite pro-military and was a little shocked when I told him 10 % of the homeless were veterans.

How does this make him stingy though?

Oh I was just following on from the last couple of posts.

I did have a friend in high school who used to come to my place to eat dinner probably 4-5 times pw. One afternoon I was at her place and she told her parents she was going to eat at my place and they replied "Great that saves us some money". I stopped hanging out with her as much after that. I felt like my mum's generous nature was being taken advantage of and she was a single parent and hardly rolling in cash. Also whenever the two of us were out and about, she never bought food or drinks but would share whatever I had lol.

He thinks it should be 5% tops.

He may not be super-stingy, but I suspect that an attitude of disdain toward the homeless is not associated with overly enthusiastic generosity, either.

Rexx, you should really blow his mind and point out that in Australia the number one cause of homelessness is domestic violence and that 15% of the homeless have a pre-existing mental illness and 16% develop one after losing their housing.

Compassion, he should try some.

In their review of the literature 25 years ago, Drake, Osher and Wailach (1991) noted that approximately 30% of homeless individuals suffered from severe mental illness, another 30% suffered from substance abuse, and approx. 10-20% of the homeless population struggled with the triple whammy of homelessness, major mental illness, and substance abuse.

Reference
Drake, R.E., Osher, F.C., Wailach, M.A. (1991). Homelessness and dual diagnosis. American Psychologist, Vol. 46, No. II, 1149-1158.

I totally agree. I did mention mental illness and domestic violence and also the prevalence of older women experiencing it in rural areas. I'm quite surprised he has the attitude he does considering we would have been a high risk family for homelessness if we hadn't had supportive grandparents. I do think I gave him some insights into it and hopefully his attitude has softened somewhat. Strangely my other brother who is way more right wing is really concerned about homelessness. I think he got a real shock when he visited the US.

Rexx, maybe since your brother is very pro-military, he could help some homeless veterans navigate the social safety net system. People are often ignorant about what's available to help them (or in some sadder cases, require some kind of medical intervention before they are capable of asking for help that they desperately need.)

I'm a firm believer in being the change you want to see in the world. If he finds it especially egregious for veterans to be homeless (I agree with him, fwiw) it's an opportunity for him to make the world a little better.

she later went to his hotel room.

As pointed out above, but in different language, you are a POS.

along with the aforementioned compassion, add empathy to the words that you need to look up in the dictionary.

This thread was won on page 1 when the situation is spending/saving money.


"...
Anyway, every morning on the mail run, he'd stop at a local convenience store/gas station to purchase 2 Little Debbie snack cakes. They were $0.25 each. The sales tax in our area was such that if he bought 1, there was no tax. However, purchasing 2 meant the tax was enough to round up to a penny, making the total $0.51. Not only would he stand in line twice, buying them one at a time, he would pay for both with a credit card, as he made 1% on purchases."

The old 1 cent and .05 cent trick

Here is my "reverse" stingy story,

Im coming home late from work one nite and stop at the shady gas station to get a couple beers. Dude step in from no where,says he needs to show me something and starts lifting his shirt and my heart rate goes up even though Im thinking no way is he going to rob in all these lights in front of the store.

He shows me this hideous scar he got from the "war" and says he needs some spare change. Besides the $2.25 that I got for the 2 beers I have nothing to give him, then I remembered all the pennies Ive been saving in my center console.

There were probably nearly 200 pennies and I offered it to the man.
He looked at them and said he didnt want the pennies

So I guess beggars are pretty spoiled these days.

one "homeless" guy told me he had venmo after I said i dont have cash

My step dad offered a beggar a meal at McDonald’s or something and the guy said it wasn’t healthy or good enough and that he was wondering if he could take him the Olive Garden instead. Must be nice to be begging and have standards. Guess he wasn’t starving. I also give a kid a dollar one time at a gas station after he asked for it and then he asked me if I could take him to a buffet. Needless to say, I don’t really help those on the streets anymore. I want to help but it’s typically not worth the annoyance.

I had a business partner who asked me to help pick a holiday party location and my friend had recently became head chef so we settled on that. He then wanted me to ask him to mute the menu so the more expensive items wouldn’t show and when I looked the most expensive item was like $34 which is already not expensive. I offered to cover half the bill but he aggressively insisted to pay. My friend is both super nice and owes me favors so for our 12 person group he got us a $20/head credit and got us a flight of special off menu apps while our group arrived (that in itself was a full meal). This is a place where you get blue cheese foam with your ribeye and plating looks like a reality show, so super reasonable deal my friend got us.

Only ten people showed up and the bill came to under $400 and that’s with 3 courses that included splitting every dessert and drinks. When the bill arrived I expected him to be ecstatic that it wasn’t $1000 but instead he nagged the waitress to ask the chef because “there was supposed to be help with the bill”.

He then only tipped on the discounted amount. This guy already made his millions pre housing crash so it’s just a frugal thing but I was really embarrassed and shipped the waitress some cash behind the scenes.

Now if someone hasn’t been in the restaurant business, a lot of this is forgivable but he had opened and closed several restaurants as side projects over the years so I couldn’t understand how he was thinking for the bill.

It's actually important that they provide their own products and vacuum so that there is no question that they are providing a service for a fee rather than being your employee. You don't want to have to start paying payroll taxes and social security for them.

We've all had those encounters. I once gave a guy a twenty dollar bill and he asked for more. But I've also had people literally cry when all I had on me was pocket change or I gave them a loaf of bread and a jar of peanut butter. In the end, I'm the richer one from the boost to my own self-worth. Being generous and sending some good out into the world is worth doing.

While it is certainly a factor, just using your cleaning products and vacuum is not enough to make a determination that cleaning people are employees. I would go so far as to say it is relatively unimportant.

You almost certainly know more about it than I do. All I know is what I've been told by my parents' cleaning service, which will use your products if you're finicky but insists on bringing mops and brooms and vacuums.

Might also have some liability considerations. They break their own vacuum, they know to replace it. What if your vacuum stops working while they are using it?