Stingiest thing you've seen stingy people do

2 Wheels Good

RoboRat wrote: »

I gave my wife 2 tickets to a concert for her birthday this year... I got them free from one of my account handlers :-)

She was absolutely delighted and thought I had spend loads

Wait until you turn up and everyone around you is a work colleague

byronbay2

byronbay2 wrote: »

Anyhoo, I got married many years ago and had quite a swanky do in the finest wedding hotel in Cork (the wife's idea, obvs). We had a wedding list with some expensive and some cheap stuff (10-20 yos) on it. A good friend of my mine, reasonably well-off with both himself and wife in ft employment and 1 child, gave us a gift of 1 yellow, frilly, unbranded (i.e Michael Guiney type thing) bedsheet. I thought at the time it was a pisstake and the "real" gift would be forthcoming later but no ...

I still have it in the original wrapping and always give a little chortle when I see it. To this day I'm amazed that my good friend would offer this as a gift - I'm assuming it was his wife's idea, she's a right bitch! We are still friends and have never mentioned this "episode" since. I'm hoping I'll be able to return it as a gift to them some day, they presumably got it as a gift originally. I wonder would they recognise/remember it!

wyndham wrote: »

That was just a joke. There is £200 inside the packet in the sheets. I hope you haven't thrown it out Pat.

Wow - what an intriguing hypothesis! No way am I opening the packaging now, though. I've fed and watered my grudge for 14 years (raised it, almost like a child, if you will) and I'm not letting it go for anyone.

Funnily enough (as a post-script to the wedding) my wife was tidying up some wedding stuff that we had stashed under the stairs, in the run up to Christmas that year (we were married in May) and what fell out of a card that was about to be put in the attic forever? Only a cheque for £250! That was punts, mind, a tidy sum in those days.

BTW, for all you tight-wads out there (reading this thread for tips), I can't recommend marriage, as a money-making exercise, highly enough. Her dad paid for the reception but we got to keep everything we were given - absolutely thousands in cash and gifts!

HansHolzel

byronbay2 wrote: »

Her dad paid for the reception but we got to keep everything we were given - absolutely thousands in cash and gifts!

Triggers meltdown in some posters :-D

Valentine1

byronbay2 wrote: »

...Her dad paid for the reception but we got to keep everything we were given - absolutely thousands in cash and gifts!

A fine tradition but one that is less and less common going by what I gather from some of my recently married friends.

I am pie

Valentine1 wrote: »

A fine tradition but one that is less and less common going by what I gather from some of my recently married friends.

Paid for the lot ourselves. Still got a sore piece from the doing over it took from the various suppliers!

byronbay2

Valentine1 wrote: »

A fine tradition but one that is less and less common going by what I gather from some of my recently married friends.

Ah well, obviously you've got to pick the right woman!!

Don't get me wrong, it was still an expensive lark, what with the bride, bridesmaids, flowergirls, flowers, band/disco, cake, church, stationary and whatever you're having yourself. Still, turned a tidy profit on the venture - careful profiling of the (prospective) guests was vital, of course.

When it comes to invitations, you've got to be absolutely ruthless with any unemployed/deadbeat/tightwad types (however close you are) in favour of the retired (ideally public servants), wealthy, unmarried and friends/acquaintances who are known to be flathúlach. Picking guests is an art, really.















For the terminally dim, I would like to point out that I'M JOKING!!

RoboRat

Triggers meltdown in some posters

I am playing the long game, her Dad has a lot of land with good road frontage so it's an investment so to speak :cool:

Wilberto

RoboRat wrote: »

I am playing the long game, her Dad has a lot of land with good road frontage so it's an investment so to speak :cool:

Who ever said romance was dead??!! :P

RoboRat

Who ever said romance was dead

No, his name is Ronan and he is not dead,

yet.

byronbay2

RoboRat wrote: »

No, his name is Ronan and he is not dead,

yet.

Oh man, you are SOOOO busted!! Should have put a little disclaimer at the bottom, like I did. I reckon you can expect some stinge in the bedroom until the New Year!:D

kilkenny12

bear1 wrote: »

Ah here will you grow up. How am I going "crazy"? I'm called a gob****e and I'm supposed to say ah thanks?
Let it go will ya thats a good lad

shhh

roboshatner

But are the Stingy People in Ireland are they not the smartest people for being good with money especially during this recession and the other one in the 80s ?

SV

roboshatner wrote: »

But are the Stingy People in Ireland are they not the smartest people for being good with money especially during this recession and the other one in the 80s ?

Stingy people are the reason recessions go on so long

Mahogany

roboshatner wrote: »

But are the Stingy People in Ireland are they not the smartest people for being good with money especially during this recession and the other one in the 80s ?

Culture of stinginess in the UK, actually no I'm calling it sensible.

People went crazy during the boom times, spending money everywhere, didn't save

Generally I think Irish people don't know when they're being ripped off, look at the recent DART fare increases, why isnt there a massive protest about that ???

roboshatner

So we should spend all the money we have on crap we do not actually need at all and end up broke beyond belief in destitute.

So saving is a bad thing ?

You walk down any street in town and you see people coming out of stores with bags and bags of clothes and games and phones.

Recession ? are we not in one....

Are people that buying all the stuff not stingy ?

and the people not buying all that crap the bad people ?

So who is the stingy ones ?

Who are we bullying here...

I have asked to many questions of these people.

SV wrote: »

Stingy people are the reason recessions go on so long

roboshatner

Thank you my friend

Mahogany wrote: »

Culture of stinginess in the UK, actually no I'm calling it sensible.

People went crazy during the boom times, spending money everywhere, didn't save

Generally I think Irish people don't know when they're being ripped off, look at the recent DART fare increases, why isnt there a massive protest about that ???

suicide_circus

Mahogany wrote: »

Culture of stinginess in the UK, actually no I'm calling it sensible.

People went crazy during the boom times, spending money everywhere, didn't save

Generally I think Irish people don't know when they're being ripped off, look at the recent DART fare increases, why isnt there a massive protest about that ???

Because people accept and understand that staff and former employees in CIE require gargantuan pensions.

SV

roboshatner wrote: »

So we should spend all the money we have on crap we do not actually need at all and end up broke beyond belief in destitute.

So saving is a bad thing ?

You walk down any street in town and you see people coming out of stores with bags and bags of clothes and games and phones.

Recession ? are we not in one....

Are people that buying all the stuff not stingy ?

and the people not buying all that crap the bad people ?

So who is the stingy ones ?

Who are we bullying here...

I have asked to many questions of these people.

I honestly cannot make sense of any of that.

SweepTheLeg

Was excited when I saw this thread had loads of pages full of new posts.

Think out of them all there were 3 stories! I'm sad and bored now.

miamee

Heard a story last night of an old relative (a long time dead since I was a child) who used to send Christmas cards to family but they would have a bit at the end cut off on the inside...where the original sender (to him) had signed their name

Apparently he did it more for the laugh than anything but still...stingy git :pac:

Cantona's Collars

I know a guy who fills his kids baby bath using the shower as he won't use the immersion to heat the water,he also waits 'til they are boiling the kettle for a cuppa to wash up or else rinses the dishes with cold water.The dishwasher is an ornament as "it costs a fortune to run".Thing is he sees this as normal and wonders why everyone else doesn't do it.

Michael D Not Higgins

It makes sense to only heat the water you need to use. Heating water by electricity is mad expensive. I'm just glad I have a gas boiler and the gas units are a quarter of the price of elec units here.

Lucena

zerks wrote: »

I know a guy who fills his kids baby bath using the shower as he won't use the immersion to heat the water,he also waits 'til they are boiling the kettle for a cuppa to wash up or else rinses the dishes with cold water.The dishwasher is an ornament as "it costs a fortune to run".Thing is he sees this as normal and wonders why everyone else doesn't do it.

People like this make me laugh, as 9 times out of ten, if you ask them how much it costs, they won't know. They won't even have a notion of electrical consumption of devices, if you tell them the device consumes 850W they won't be able to calculate the cost.

A bit like people who'll leave lights on all day to save electricity, because if they turn them off, they'll have to turn them back on and "sure turning them on uses more electricity than I'd save if I turned them off". It that were true, the power surges would blackout the country every time someone switched on a light! I'm sure this myth has cost a lot of people a lot of money over the years. Anyway, this is a stinge thread, here's a stinge story.

Stinge story

May have told this before, but anyway.

I worked for a guy years ago who owned a small industrial estate, had a lot of building projects on the go, owned a hotel etc. The guy was a legendary stinge, or good at making savings, depending on who you talked to. A couple of examples.

There was this pile of old planks that had been used as walkways on scaffolding, chipped, covered in paint, and with loads of nails hammered in to them. My job for one whole day (it would've been more only something else came up) was to take the claw hammer and pull every nail out so that they could be used again! Impossible to pull out a nail without bending it so the nails were pretty much useless.

I used to have to use a forklift sometimes to move stuff around. I never had any formal training (this was twenty years ago), certification or anything, but it wasn’t too complicated. One lever for forward, back, and neutral. Another lever to raise/lower the forks, and another one to tilt them. Grand.

One of the storage areas in the industrial estate was used by Customs and Excise to store cars that had been seized, before being put up for auction, I suppose. However at the back of the storage area, the stinge had some crates that needed to be moved out pronto, so I had to go in with the forklift and get them out. Now this wasn’t really a warehouse situation with everything stocked on shelving areas and nice clear alleys between them. Stuff was just shoved in anywhere there was space; planks, cracked toilets, boxes of bobbins, old bags of cement, plastic sheeting etc. all over the place.

So I had to delicately drive the forklift past the cars, go in and pick up the crates, and manoeuvre them back out past the cars, making sure not to scratch the cars while avoiding all the crap strewn around the place. The fun thing was, the forklift didn’t have any brakes!!! To stop the forklift (say I’m driving forward) I had to put the lever from forward to reverse, and just at the moment the forklift stopped going forward but just before it started reversing, slap it into neutral. No emergency stops here!

Of course I thought of it as a challenge, and managed not to scratch or damage any cars, but the stinge, for want of a couple of hundred quid to get the brakes looked at, was willing to risk thousands of pounds of damage to Customs and Excise cars, and probably the storage contract with them, by putting a dodgy forklift in the hands of an eighteen year old guy who didn’t have any experience.:rolleyes:

Frank Black

Lucena wrote: »

.
So I had to delicately drive the forklift past the cars, go in and pick up the crates, and manoeuvre them back out past the cars, making sure not to scratch the cars while avoiding all the crap strewn around the place. The fun thing was, the forklift didn’t have any brakes!!! To stop the forklift (say I’m driving forward) I had to put the lever from forward to reverse, and just at the moment the forklift stopped going forward but just before it started reversing, slap it into neutral. No emergency stops here!

Of course I thought of it as a challenge, and managed not to scratch or damage any cars, but the stinge, for want of a couple of hundred quid to get the brakes looked at, was willing to risk thousands of pounds of damage to Customs and Excise cars, and probably the storage contract with them, by putting a dodgy forklift in the hands of an eighteen year old guy who didn’t have any experience.:rolleyes:

Sounds more like criminal negligence than stinge.

hblock21

Lucena wrote: »

Stinge story

May have told this before, but anyway.

I worked for a guy years ago who owned a small industrial estate, had a lot of building projects on the go, owned a hotel etc. The guy was a legendary stinge, or good at making savings, depending on who you talked to. A couple of examples.

There was this pile of old planks that had been used as walkways on scaffolding, chipped, covered in paint, and with loads of nails hammered in to them. My job for one whole day (it would've been more only something else came up) was to take the claw hammer and pull every nail out so that they could be used again! Impossible to pull out a nail without bending it so the nails were pretty much useless.

I used to have to use a forklift sometimes to move stuff around. I never had any formal training (this was twenty years ago), certification or anything, but it wasn’t too complicated. One lever for forward, back, and neutral. Another lever to raise/lower the forks, and another one to tilt them. Grand.

One of the storage areas in the industrial estate was used by Customs and Excise to store cars that had been seized, before being put up for auction, I suppose. However at the back of the storage area, the stinge had some crates that needed to be moved out pronto, so I had to go in with the forklift and get them out. Now this wasn’t really a warehouse situation with everything stocked on shelving areas and nice clear alleys between them. Stuff was just shoved in anywhere there was space; planks, cracked toilets, boxes of bobbins, old bags of cement, plastic sheeting etc. all over the place.

So I had to delicately drive the forklift past the cars, go in and pick up the crates, and manoeuvre them back out past the cars, making sure not to scratch the cars while avoiding all the crap strewn around the place. The fun thing was, the forklift didn’t have any brakes!!! To stop the forklift (say I’m driving forward) I had to put the lever from forward to reverse, and just at the moment the forklift stopped going forward but just before it started reversing, slap it into neutral. No emergency stops here!

Of course I thought of it as a challenge, and managed not to scratch or damage any cars, but the stinge, for want of a couple of hundred quid to get the brakes looked at, was willing to risk thousands of pounds of damage to Customs and Excise cars, and probably the storage contract with them, by putting a dodgy forklift in the hands of an eighteen year old guy who didn’t have any experience.:rolleyes:

So your employer got you as the employee to do work.
Ok.

Frank Black

hblock21 wrote: »

So your employer got you as the employee to do work.
Ok.

I've recently come into possession of a narrow, tapered, sharp ended object.
I think it's a 'point', and it may be yours as you seem to be missing it.

PM for details.

bear1

Frank Black wrote: »

I've recently come into possession of a narrow, tapered, sharp ended object.
I think it's a 'point', and it may be yours as you seem to be missing it.

PM for details.

Hahahahahahahahah post of the day me thinks

Ciaran_B

roboshatner wrote: »

So we should spend all the money we have on crap we do not actually need at all and end up broke beyond belief in destitute.

So saving is a bad thing ?

This concept is known as the Paradox of Thrift.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_thrift

billie1b

My wife's Aunt bought one of the cousins 5 scratch cards for his Birthday, he scratched all 5 and was lucky enough to win €10,000, he was delighted, but she wasn't, she demanded the scratch card from him saying she had the receipt for it and if not would call the cops to say he robbed it. She claimed the prize and gave him €50

SweepTheLeg

billie1b wrote: »

My wife's Aunt bought one of the cousins 5 scratch cards for his Birthday, he scratched all 5 and was lucky enough to win €10,000, he was delighted, but she wasn't, she demanded the scratch card from him saying she had the receipt for it and if not would call the cops to say he robbed it. She claimed the prize and gave him €50

That made me really angry, also who gives receipts for scratch cards? I've never got one.

Ok i have a stinge story. A friend of mine never brings money with him on a night out, he always robs peoples drinks from tables. I'm surprised he's never got caught. Last weekend i saw him help a woman carry a tray of drinks to her table then he took one of them without her knowing, also at the end of the night he pours all the half empty drinks people left into 1 glass to make his "special cocktail".