Uncle Pete
I have an uncle and when we were all invited over to stay for the weekend many moons ago, he asked if me and my sister were fussy eaters. My dad told him that my sister is a tad fussy but as long as there's cereal she'd be happy as a pig in sh!t.

so we arrived at the house for the weekend to find that my uncle had hidden ALL traces of cereal in his house. we were told he was all out but later found the boxes under the sink or some stupid hiding spot.

the sunday morning we were told by my uncle and his then wife/gf/whatever that they would treat us to breakfast.

so my father took us all off to tesco with the promise of a nice full english. when it came to paying my uncle refused to pay and stated that it was actually my fathers idea to go there in the first place.

some kind exchanges were made to the effect of 'fuck off you tight twunt' - and they didn't speak for years.

until this year when he brings over the offspring from his failed marraige who proceeded to try and demolish our house. happy days.

(However there is a moral to this story. hsi wife divorced him for a younger man (what happens when a 35 year old marries an 18 year old), got custody of both children, got the majority of the house which was a secluded lovely house in the middle of the country.) and now he's a jobless wonder who is still tight as ever, but poor as fuck.

yay.
(Chojin doesn't know what day of the week it is, Fri 24 Oct 2008, 11:02, Reply)

Andy
Not saying he's tight, but I swear you can hear him squeek when he walks.

His GF asked him to use his mobile to phone a friend. His response? "Wait until snee gets here - he gets free minutes on his..."

And if we're drinking and in a round, if it's his turn, he'll wait until as many of the roundees are absent (toilet, smoking) before stumping up for a couple of pints.

Nice bloke though (for a Mackem).
( snee held his breath since, Fri 24 Oct 2008, 11:01, 4 replies)

Tight is not leaving the price on a Christmas Present
But leaving the sale tag on to show much they saved.
(Jugular, Fri 24 Oct 2008, 11:00, Reply)

Friend of a friend
I know it's a bit of a crap story when it's a friend of a friend, but it's the tightest thing I've ever heard of!

A guy in my friend's halls of residence at University charged his girlfriend a percentage of the price of laundering his bedclothes depending upon the percentage of the month she had stayed in his residence!

She's still with him?!
(redshoes, Fri 24 Oct 2008, 10:54, Reply)

Apologies in advance for the lack of teh funnies
And for a tenous link actually.

But the last company I worked for was a major Insurance company. Which was pretty soul destroying in itself.

In fact, to the point where I started to loathe myself for being there.

But I didn't realise their true evil came when I found out that they were refusing to pay the claims for the 9/11 attacks because they refused to accept the twin towers were two separate buildings and that they had to pay their maximum liability for each one, rather than just once.

Despite the fact that they had insured them as two buildings.

And the fuckers won the court case, somehow.

Although I don't know what happened upon appeal, because that was my final straw and I quit, but I hope they got shafte.

Insurance companies are the ultimate in tight fisted bastards, no one on earth comes close.
( scarpe We Stole Bikes, Fri 24 Oct 2008, 10:49, Reply)

11 million in the bank, but...
Now, I have nothing against tightening your belt when finances are low, and depriving yourself of those lovely pastries on display when doing the weekly supermarket shop...

HOWEVER, when the deprivation is not you, but your 9 year old daughter, and you have 11 MILLION in the bank, AND you've just spent a rumoured seven figure sum on what can only be described as a new pet, that is a little different.

I worked for a rich family as a nanny/slave for a while, and their adorable 9 year old daughter (who was incidentally always dressed in hand-me-downs from relatives) loved painting. So she and I would while away the hours making Blue Peter inspired card models, and painting them with acrylic paints. This because her parents were too cheap to ever give me free rein to take her nice places.

Whilst out in town one day I happened to venture into WHSmith, who had a set of acrylic paints, 24 different colours, reduced from £16 to £3.60. Great, thinks I, the little girl will love these! I get back and check with her mother it's ok to buy them for her.

Now this woman has a reputed £11 million in the bank, drives around in a top of the range range rover, and likes horses. So much so that she is rumoured to have spent a 7 figure sum on her latest acquisition.

Her response?

No.

I explained how cheap they were and how the little girl needed them for the stuff we were doing, but the woman continued to put up such a fuss OVER £3.60!!! ..that I decided to screw her, pay for the damn paints out of my pittance of a wage, and give them the girl for her birthday. She was delighted.

I also told the mother to shove her job up her arse pretty shortly after that too.

Oh, and since leaving the job I still chat to the little girl regularly, as she often calls up for help with her homework - because her mother can't understand it.
(Psyche finishes work at the end of June! Yay!!!, Fri 24 Oct 2008, 10:36, 3 replies)

Booze Tightwad
I was once staying over for the night at a friend's, and beforehand I called her saying "I'm getting some booze, do you need any?" She says yes, and that she'd like some cider. So off I trot to the local off-license and get it. I get there not only to hear complaints that she's not too keen on that particular brand, but that she also has a 2 litre bottle of booze anyway! I wouldn't mind, but I said need, not want and she knew I was short of money. I say I'm taking it back if she doesn't like it, and all's well, although in my hungover state I forgot it.

Fast forward to the next week...

I ask her where it is as I'm setting off. "Ummm, I don't know where it is, my mum's moved it." So when leaving (she would never see me out, always stayed in her room) I asked her mum where it was. "Oh it's in the storeroom, where she put it" Cheek! I know exactly what she was plaaning as soon as I heard it, she was going to give them to another friend of hers, one she was trying to get into her bed!

Then there's countless times where she said I could have tea at hers, so long as it was pizza. I'm not a huge fan of pizza, but there ya go. The only reason it was always pizza i recently discovered is she had a relative who owned a pizza place and she could get it for free! I wouldn't mind, but the pizzas weren't the best, and I always forked out for chinese whenever she came to my place.

Then there's the time when she phoned me up whilst I was at a different friend's across the road asking if I would give her friend (the one who almost got the cider) a lift home... but she "couldn't afford" to give me any petrol money. She knew I'd be there drinking, and that it was a 10 mile round-trip to do so. Obviously, I said I'd ring her back in 5 mins and promptly switched my phone off.
(Stephen5555 is posting on, Fri 24 Oct 2008, 10:31, Reply)

Typical behaviour.
My ex wife once gave me my own watch back for Christmas.

She’d borrowed it (for some reason), broke it and then, as a Christmas gift, gave it back to me.

Granted, she’d had the watch repaired, but from the point of borrowing it, breaking it and then giving it back to me, 7 months had elapsed.

The watch-battery had also failed by this point, but she didn’t get that replaced because ‘I didn’t break that, so it’s your responsibility to fix’.

I couldn’t help thinking that, ‘Hmm.. if only I could have used the watch over those 7 months and enjoyed some of the remaining battery life’.

As it goes, it was only about a fiver to stick a new battery in, so that was no great shakes, but you’d like to think that if you’d borrowed something for that length of time, you’d give it back in the condition it was leant in.

Mullered.
( JeffTheDogFucker Can you dig it?, Fri 24 Oct 2008, 10:28, Reply)

free houses
the bedshitter used to wind me up. despite earning about £150k a year, nothing could be thrown away. food would be eaten weeks past its sellby date; other people's leftover dregs would be hooned off in the pub; he would never ever get a taxi anywhere.

but by far the most annoying thing about this was his catchphrase: "i'm not tight. i'm just careful." no, no. you are a twat. tight or great big flapping douchebag, doesn't matter really.

also once had a multi millionaire landlord when i was a letting agent. he was a total and utter cock. leaning against my battered company fiesta, he once sighed "you know, rswipe, i'll never be a billionaire." my heart bled for him. it really did. almost as much as his would have done if i could have stabbed him as i would have enjoyed doing.

he bought furniture for his houses that was so pikey it made a grown man, a russian lecturer at the university of manchester, weep with rage and despair when he saw it. "why he do this to me?" he kept crooning down the phone.

then, to top it all off, he was the king of adverse possession (aka squatters' rights). he would drive around looking for empty houses, change the locks, put his name on the postbox, wait 12 years like a big fat bald basking lurking shark, then...... bang. new house to let! thank god they changed that law when they did.
( rachelswipe with a fork, Fri 24 Oct 2008, 10:22, 12 replies)

Amazon!
A few years ago when money wasn't exactly in abundance I decided to treat myself for my birthday and ordered a futurama dvd box set.

I'd really wanted it and it felt like a nice present to myself on my birthday.

On the day it arrived (day before my birthday) my girlfriend said she hadn't been able to get me a birthday present.

Long story short she wrapped up and gave me the dvd set I had bought for myself.

Not sure what was worse, the fact I'd paid for it or that while pointlessly unwrapping it I already knew exactly what it was inside.
(golddust QOTW now revolves around being a cunt, Fri 24 Oct 2008, 10:10, 5 replies)

The Condiment King
I have a friend (Lets call him Ian, cos thats his name) who is well known in our circle of friends for being a bit of a tight arse.

Anyway, Myself, another friend, Dan, and Ian went to a Wetherspoons after college for drinks and some food. Well Dan and I did but Ian had no intentions of spending money.

I offered to get him a beer, he declined. When ordering food, Dan offered to get him some chips, again he declined.

So when our food arrives, I get up to grab a few sachets of ketchup. Ian follows and takes 2 sachets of each condiment (Ketchup, mayo, horseradish, brown sauce, tartare, AND vinegar) and one by one just sucks the contents into his mouth.

"Are you sure you dont want some chips, mate" we as with complete incredulity. "No, no. I'm fine with this".

He also repeated this in Burger King, but this time with 40 cartons of UHT milk.

Tight Fisted Cock Muncher.
( itsthebttower, Fri 24 Oct 2008, 10:09, 2 replies)

Paid to have a mobile phone
I take extreme saving to far out levels. I don't end up poisoning myself with grotty improvised meals but I will engineer money saving deals beyond logical.

That's why for the last 3 years I've been PAID to have a mobile phone & home insurance!

Careful choice of the right cashback deal, contract length, phone handset etc means that I'm currently on a 12 month contract for which I'm getting the 12 months reimbursed in cashback form.

Add to this the affiliate payment of £45 I got for taking out in the contract in the first place and I'm already up on the deal.

Then I've never been fussed about having a decent handset so I reused my old one and the new (free) one went out on ebay just before Christmas for £110!

All in by early December I will have been PAID £155 to have a contract mobile phone for 1 year!!!

A similar deal on house insurance has seen me paid £70 to have house insurance free of charge.

Admittedly it did take hours to figure out the connection of deals to make it feasible and keeping calendar dates is very important to claim on the right dates!
(golddust QOTW now revolves around being a cunt, Fri 24 Oct 2008, 9:59, 5 replies)

Perhaps I am a tightwad; the line keeps shifting
It's only this year that, due to a couple of fortuitous and long overdue payrises, I started earning a good salary for the first time. Now that I've got over the horror of paying 40% tax I've become more and more aware that things that were once unaffordable are now within reach. Example: yesterday I took a peak-time train instead of the usual trick of waiting two and a half hours for an off-peak one (that would have saved me 20 quid). I got a taxi last week and it cost me nine quid whereas my normal bus journey would have been two quid but would have taken an hour longer.

I grew up really poor. Since I was a child I've been used to thrifty, penny-pinching ways. When I got older, as a student (and I was a student for eight or nine years) I was used to living on fresh air and porridge oats and I used to win beer at pub quizzes if I fancied a night out.

But now? Now I have so much shame and apprehension associated with spending my own money (and I will attribute this in part to my Protestant frugality and my Catholic guilt) that I find myself automatically following the ingrained spendthrift ways of my life to date. I reuse envelopes, and not because I give a crap about the planet. If anyone knows how to break this habit so that I can become gloriously profligate, please let me know.
( crackhouseceilidhband Fuck off back to Mumsnet, Fri 24 Oct 2008, 9:58, 23 replies)

I briefly lived in the wonderful Netherlands

and as I thought it was imporatant to intergrate myself into their society i spent most of my time getting stoned, smoking drugs and watching hardcore porn.

No really, aside from that I had a decent bar job, long hours but good staff and fun customers. It was a great way to begin to learn the lingo and to streak a little orangey dutchness through me.

To complete my cameleonesque change from uptight Englishman to laid back groovy dutchman I thought I needed some new threads and one day went on a massive shopping spree.

I decked myself out with Dutch fashions from top to toe and head to foot. All was well with my local garb until within a week of purchase my shoes starting to fall apart.

I consulted a dutch friend of mine and he confirmed my worst fears I had bought some shite clogs.
( Naked Ape call me Caitlyn, Fri 24 Oct 2008, 9:57, 1 reply)

When you run out of delicious marmite

Swill out the jar with hot water to make a yeasty, beefy stock that'll fill out the flavour of minced based dishes.
( Naked Ape call me Caitlyn, Fri 24 Oct 2008, 9:49, 4 replies)

My boyfriend is from the North
And the rumours are quite true:

+ he keeps wrapping paper and labels for re-use
+ he turns off the heating and hot water while he is out but complains for hours when he returns because the house is cold
+ all of our shopping bills are scrutinised so that he can work out (actually get me to work out) how much we owe each other - this results in arguments about unidentified items on the receipt ("that must be yours")

I wouldn't mind as much except that I'm not badly paid but he earns twice as much as me and gets bonuses and regular large sums from his mother at Christmas and birthdays.
(BearWithLittleBrain, Fri 24 Oct 2008, 9:43, 4 replies)

Tight pfft
You want to hear about tightwads you should see my boss. He will skim the budget we have for all areas of our business, the cooking staff have to make do with the cheaper food, the company vehicles are so cheap they could fall apart easily and most of the staff have received next to no training (believe me some are very useless at their job- you could easily walk in off the street and they wouldn’t even ask what you are doing until something major happens). This all came back to bite him on the ass however as he cut back on costs when setting up a new office and chose to ignore my warnings about the place having a design flaw.

Thanks to this stupid cost cutting exercises my slightly backwards son easily blew the whole place up. Damn Palpatine tried to place the blame on me for that, which is one of the reasons why I threw him down that well.
(mon bison powered by magnets, Fri 24 Oct 2008, 9:43, 6 replies)

Pizza

White bread + ketchup + cheese = pizza.



That is all
( Naked Ape call me Caitlyn, Fri 24 Oct 2008, 9:42, 4 replies)

prepay mobiles
Went from a £30 monthly contract (thats a ridiculous amount in my opinion for a phone) to prepay. I'm a bit of a twat now for phoning people and hanging up when it rings, leaving my number on their call list. They call back saying 'did you call me?' and I pretend that there was a network issue or something. Works a treat. Topped up my phone in July with a tenner, still got £4.68 left. And never reply to texts - the worlds biggest con.
( I have run out of coke is a little sweaty, Fri 24 Oct 2008, 9:41, 5 replies)

Vesty
Dave came from a family of miserable tight-wads. Him and his 2 sisters had a whole catalogue of ways to get out of paying for things.

They did the obvious "Oh I've forgottem my wallet/purse" thing at the pubs.

They did the "I won't buy a can of drink" but then seconds later "Can I have a sip of yours" thing.

We even went for a pizza once (in the US on a holiday). 7 of us. I put a tip down, my friend did, and so on, until it got to them three. One glance a the modest pile and they proclaimed "Looks like enough there..." and walked out!

This is how, on holidays, they managed to take less than me, but come back with considerably more.

Mind you, now he's married to a real spender so I suppose I'm having the last laugh! (Oh, and I shagged his cousin).

Thinking about it, vesty's a real mine for other QOTW's.
(Kliper Filllets Getting noticed by twats on the internet since, Fri 24 Oct 2008, 9:41, Reply)

Cooking oil
Once, when I was completely and utterly skint, I couldn't afford diesel for my car - so I decided to put cooking oil in, at £1 for 3 litres.

The problem is, it didn't just work - it worked very well. My car smoked less, had more oomph and smelt nicer.

So from that day forth, every time I filled that car up, I filled it up with £20 worth of cooking oil instead of £60 worth of diesel. The engine never missed a beat and was still going strong, with 150,000 miles on it, when the bodywork fell apart around it.

I scrapped that car for £50. I bought it for £50 in the first place, too. That's a bit tight.
(Half of Stephen Fry's right buttock pissed on your dog on, Fri 24 Oct 2008, 9:36, 26 replies)

it's about priorities
My bloke and I had a candlelight dinner recently - not because it was romantic (I was drinking my Lidl wine from a "World's Best Grandma" mug - and I can assure you, a child has never passed my lips) but because his electricity meter had run out yet again.

To be fair, he's a penniless musician so it isn't tightwad behaviour, it's the necessity of surviving from gig to gig. No, the tightwad behaviour is because although we had to sit pretty much in the dark without even being able to boil the kettle, he always, always, always has enough money for weed.
( crackhouseceilidhband Fuck off back to Mumsnet, Fri 24 Oct 2008, 9:34, 19 replies)

When working as a court official,
I was one day dealing one day with the family of a man who was in custody for a breach of his bail conditions. They were nice folks.

The bloke was duly 'ad up before the magistrates and the story came out.

He'd got bail for some petty offences with a condition that he stayed out of the county where he'd committed the crimes.

However, on the next Saturday night he'd taken his family to a pub for a birthday meal. The pub is well-known for good food, but is also, he failed to notice, unfortunately just over the county border.

An off-duty policeman recognised him and called it in. A van turned up and he was carted away, to the humiliation of his family.

The Beaks were nice about it. To widespread laughter, they released him on condition that he buy an A-to-Z.

Outside court, I chatted to his wife and she told me how embarrassing the incident had been.
'I'm never going there again!' she said. 'And we had vouchers for Two Meals For One Night, too. Won't be using them now - you might as well have them!'

I responded that I couldn't possibly accept such a bribe, while whipping the vouchers into my gown pocket.

So that's how I came to take my mate, her new fiancee and Mr Quar out for a congratulatory posh meal, in a crowded pub, along with all the other cheapskates for miles.
And possibly one or two beady-eyed off-duty plods - who knows?
(Juan Quar is clinging to her front teeth on, Fri 24 Oct 2008, 9:33, Reply)

Take more than one bottle into the shower?
OK, I admit it. I AM as tight as a duck's chuff.

Too mean to pay out on shampoo, shower gel etc etc, I keep a small bottle, which I top up from any bathroom I might be passing. The resultant mix is currently a pinky-grey with little white blobs floating about.

A recent stay in a top-class Premier Inn (on expenses) filled my bottle to the brim with their wall-mounted Dove shower goo dispenser.

If I'm really clever, and visit enough bathrooms, I can fill up DOZENS of these bottles of all-in-one cleaning jism and sell them on from a market stall. This time next year, Rodders...
( Scaryduck LIKES EGG, Fri 24 Oct 2008, 9:25, 3 replies)

Tight, yes - Mean, no
My great aunt and uncle have a nice home, and nice things, but pensions are shit and they need to save every penny to be able to keep those nice things in their nice house.

So calling on them after dark can be tricky as they love to save on lighting costs: -

From the outside the house looks empty as EVERY light in the house is off. Only when you enter can you see the TV is the only thing on.

My uncle uses his LED head torch to navagate the house.

Also, for nightime peeing trips (as old folk seem to do quite a lot of) the colour change solar powered gnomes get brought in from the garden to light the way in a crazy silent rave way.

Bless um.
(Beejster, Fri 24 Oct 2008, 9:19, 3 replies)

ALWAYS poo at work
You save a fortune on toilet paper & water bills PLUS you're getting paid to do it!
(golddust QOTW now revolves around being a cunt, Fri 24 Oct 2008, 9:13, 14 replies)

I blame the parents.
The tightest person I know is easily my little sister. Her penny pinching from an early age is truly breathtaking. She is the reason why our local Burger King stopped putting out sachets of ketchup with the napkins, straws, sugar, and other condiments because she used to go in and take literally every sachet every other day for her new apartment. She eats lots of ketchup by the way.

The worst thing she has ever done was emailing me an e-card for my birthday, ringing me so I would call her back and she would congratulate me (for what, staying alive another year?), then sending a present with my mum when my mum came to visit me a month later. What was the present? A travel jar of freeze dried coffee.

Other highlights of her chronic anality include:

- buying a dress from a decent shop, keeping the tags on WHILST GOING OUT ON THE RAZZ and making sure that she didn’t get anything spilt on it, then taking it back and demanding her money back knowing full well that she wouldn’t be able to but then appearing to be reasonable and ‘settling’ for store credit. Rinse and repeat at all other branches of the store in her immediate environs.

- Now that she is responsible for her own budget, she doesn’t eat everyday.

- Gets my mum to drive to her apartment to take her laundry and process it because she thinks that buying washing powder doesn’t ‘align with her budget’.

- When visiting my other sister she borrowed a nice big golf umbrella from her, promptly lost it, then bought her a new £0.99 mini one that would also ‘be her birthday present’.

- Keeps a ‘slops’ bowl in the fridge for leftovers. Last time I was there she tried to tempt me with baked beans and Dundee cake (together).

- When staying in hotels, she always tried to raid the maid’s trolley for things like toothpaste and travel size bars of soap. Also towels. Also the maid’s work schedule clipboard. Once she even tried to wheel the trolley around the corner so she could have a proper root around.

- Eats spam as if spam were a normal meat.

I blame the parents.
(powervator and NONE SHALL PASS, Fri 24 Oct 2008, 9:07, 8 replies)

out of triumph comes tradgedy
My dad is rarther tight with his money to say the least.

His car is a 1972 Triumph 2.5 pi that he purchased new. As an interesting aside i have had the oppertunity to look through the original sales ledgers ( they strech back to the war and are fascinating to read)of the dealership he bought it from. I was not surprised to learn that for a period of 3 years nobody else got a better deal on a new 2.5 pi.

To the main point.
The old petrol injection system on these cars was never the best and most ended up being converted to carbs. Eventually his injectors gave up and it was time for the conversion. There were 2 diffrent sized carbs fitted to these cars a 2 inch version and a 2 1/2 inch version. My dad was given the choice of which ones he wanted there was no price difference for the units or to do the work.
Despite the 2 1/2 inch version producing more power (he tows a trailer fairly often with the car) and fuel economy not being an issue .He went for the 2 inch version.

Why?? Because "When i need a new air filter the one for the 2inch carbs is $5 cheaper"

I wish i was joking.
There are lots more stories to come on this QOTW yet.
(welgar, Fri 24 Oct 2008, 9:04, 2 replies)

Tight Christmas
Excuse: I was saving my pocket money in a doomed attempt to complete the Panini Football 78 album. If anybody's got Gerry Gow of Bristol City for a swapsie, I'll be right over to rip your arm off.

Anyway - with Christmas looming, I found myself in the dilemma of purchasing myself a pile of lovely, shiny football stickers; or lovely, shiny Christmas presents for my family.

After two hours stalking the Basildon branch of Boots the Chemist, and latterly raiding the living room, here's what they got:

Dad: Roll of Polo mints
Brother: Three (count 'em - THREE) walnuts from the bowl in the living room
Sister: Three Brazil nuts, also from the bowl in the living room
Mum: Boots own-brand Ena Sharples hair net. 10p.

All done up in newspaper because I was too tight for proper wrapping.

For some reason the hair net went down the worst, and was brought up on EVERY subsequent Christmas Day. The old lady went to her grave several years ago, pointing accusingly with the words "hair net" on her lips.

Do you think she was trying to tell me something?
( Scaryduck LIKES EGG, Fri 24 Oct 2008, 8:57, 1 reply)

A lad I was at school with used to hang around smokers corner
bumming cigs of people. Not that he was a smoker, he just collected a nice pile and toddled off to knock them out to 1st & 2nd years at 10p a pop.

Immoral fucker that he was.
( LemonEntryMyDearWatson This time, Moriarty, the hand is on the other foot, Fri 24 Oct 2008, 8:48, Reply)