My dad is cheap because...

[oxfordrebel22]

My dad is 78 now and he still checks the meters for water and electricity behind the reader. Woe to the person that gets it wrong.

My father was cheap in ways, but generous to a fault in others. School lunches were 5 bucks a week, that was our allowance. Gifts were clothes and shoes.

So at the ages of 11 and 9 my older brother and I started pushing his 25 year old push mower around to the few widow ladies yards and mowed and cleaned up for them. After the first summer of this, he informed us that we would need to put back 15% of the money to buy parts, blades, and any new equipment. He would help us fix the stuff but we learned to work, to work on, and maintain everything.

He never tried to demand what we spent our money on though except for that 15%. I bought my own stuff, outside of food,, from then on. I got a $500 hand me down pickup at 14 and spent over $4000.00 fixing everything and drove it to college for 3 years. He finally went with me to trade it and talked them into giving 2500 in trade on it. Kelly blue book said it was worth 700.

Your dad was a good man.

I’m struggling with this currently with our small child. We’ve been blessed, mostly because of having wonderful parents like yours, and aren’t wealthy but we have excess. My son is a wonderful child, who has a heart of gold. But we are spoiling him, and I can see it. Between us and his grandparents he has no idea what a “want” is, much less a need.

I understood wants, because my parents didn’t have excess. I never needed anything, though. So, it’s a really tough row to hoe when you love your child so much, but also don’t want them to be a damn brat. The best thing my parents did for me was demanded that I would work as soon as I was old enough. I also mowed yards and did all kinds of odds and end jobs, in order to have spending money. They’d often help me buy things that I wanted, but I had to have enough saved to buy it myself, first. Those lessons are worth more than any college education you could ever get. And those jobs will dang sure make you want a college education, haha. If I can be half the parent to my kids that my parents were to me, I’ll have done well.

 

[LTblows]

Best movie ever. Early Jack Black and Seth Green.