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Saturday, July 28th, 2007I bought my new computer a few weeks ago. After the purchase, I ran some errands with my dad, one of which was to stop by and do something for my aunt. Upon telling her about my very recent big ticket purchase, she was surprised that a “skinflint” like me would make such a grand purchase.
What is a skinflint? A frugal, parsimonious person, a miser. What can I say? She’s right. I don’t try to be frugal, or even “cheap.” It just so happens to be the case. Saving money has always been easy for me. I make few big ticket purchases. I’m not going to Pier One to buy fancy lampshades or whatever the hell they sell. Even when I was a college student for several years making virtually no income, I still wasn’t in debt.
Forever and ever, money just piled up for me. When I was 14-years-old, I saved up $800 that I stored in my dresser drawer. This was in 1989, 1990, and the most that I brought in for income as a weekly $25 for babysitting my siblings during the summer. A big ticket purchase to me back then was buying a pizza from Domino’s. In the army, I saved up a large nest egg that I found quite impressive. It was a tidy sum that nearly got me through all of nursing school when I was only getting the GI Bill per month. With nursing, what took me four years to save up in the army, I saved in one year.
Maybe I was a miser as a kid. Around the time as my $800 nest egg, I used to ride my bike to Long’s Drugs or Vons to buy a 2-liter of soda pretty much everyday. When I came home, I’d sell it to my siblings for fifty cents with the following caveat: they had to add six cubes of ice from the automatic ice maker in the freezer. Mind you, I bought this 2-liter of soda for probably under a buck back then, and now I was selling a cup for fifty cents. I stuck by it too. My brother or sister, or at the time stepbrother or sister, would have no money or would complain to a parent. My parent would ask me to reconsider and I would refuse. It was my soda, wasn’t it? If they wanted a big soda, they shouldn’t spend their money on dumb stuff as soon as it entered their pockets. My parents couldn’t argue with my principle. So, my siblings would cough up the two quarters or sometimes, my parents would cough it up for them. It didn’t give me a very good reputation as it turned out. My whole family still holds that ritual against me.
Like I said earlier, I don’t consider myself overly cheap. I spend when it is needed but I rarely lend. People that require loans are usually not in a position or mindset to ever pay them back. You have to hound them and they always portray you as an asshole for doing so. Still, I’m glad that I don’t require that BMW in order to be happy, although I wouldn’t mind owning a Cadillac someday.