Mr. Mail Fraud

Have you ever heard of someone so cheap that they refuse to buy a 43 cent stamp?  Well, if so, I’d be really surprised because I never thought there would be anyone as cheap as my husband.  I’m simply appalled at some of the things my husband will do just to save five cents.   He’ll go as far as to commit mail fraud to save money.  Yes mail fraud. It’s one thing to be cheap, but he’s a borderline criminal! 

Let’s say you don’t have enough postage on it, the post office will send back a piece of mail to you and indicate undeliverable due to insufficient postage.  Get this – the cheapskate will put his name and our address in the “To” area and the address of the person or company he wants the mail to be sent to in the “From” area.  So the post office will end up sending the mail back to the person/company.  In essence, the piece of mail gets to the intended receiver and my husband doesn’t have to buy stamps! 

On Mother’s Day my husband got a call from his mother.  She wanted to know why a piece of mail addressed to him came to her house.  She said her name and address was in the left-hand corner of the envelope, but she had no idea what it was.  She never sent anything to him in the mail and the handwriting on the envelope wasn’t hers.  Oh, geez, I can’t believe he pulled that trick on his own mother!  He told her it was a Mother’s Day card and explained to her his method of sending mail. 

I could hear his mother’s loud voice come through the phone.

“Oh, honey, are you guys having financial troubles?  I could buy a couple book of stamps for y’all,” she said to the cheapskate. 

I just rolled my eyes.  All of this drama coming from a man who used to have no problems spending money.  Now he’ll commit mail fraud without any hesitation. 

If you thought the Mother’s Day card incident was bad….Well, one Christmas season I had him work on sending out the holiday cards.  I even gave him a book of stamps thinking that he’d use them.  Can you believe this cheapskate still pulled the mail fraud stunt?  What the hell is he thinking?!?  I got all these calls from friends and family wondering why they were getting this piece of mail addressed to my husband.  How embarrassing is that?

– Jennifer, Portland OR 

The Reluctant Flusher

My husband is probably the cheapest man you’ll ever meet.

He clips coupons, rarely eats out, buys everything on sale and constantly tries to get stuff for free. All that I can live with, and sometimes even appreciate.

But there’s one thing he does that I absolutely refuse to tolerate.

He insists on waiting until he has urinated into the toilet three times before he flushes it.

At first, I chalked it up to laziness. I’d seen that kind of thing before, disgusting as it is, from growing up with brothers. Then I asked him one day why he kept doing it, and he explained that it was to save money by not using so much water with flushing. That, by only flushing every third pee, he could cut down on the water bill by about 8 percent. (Where he got that percentage, I’ll probably never know.)

After he informed me of the reason he does such a weird thing, I explained to him just how unsanitary it is. I did some research online and printed information for him. Ultimately, he agreed that it was not a wise approach to saving money and that he would need to stop.

 

To reward his willingness to see things my way, I decided I need to devise a way to compromise. So we installed a toilet tank water saver, which makes him happy because he’s saving Dead Presidents and me happy because I’m not dead from diseases formed by toxic standing water in my bathroom.

Of course things could have always been worse. Through the ordeal, I kept telling myself, “At least it’s every third PEE!”

– Rosemary, San Jose CA

Batteries Not Included!

My husband Chris is such a cheap you-know-what, he’d rather continuously jump start our car instead of going ahead and buying a new battery for it.

This is not Chris’s everyday car, but a car he using sparingly every once in awhile. It’s his first car he drove when he was in high school, 30 years ago. It’s so embarrassing leaving a restaurant or store, and pulling out the jumper cables on this junk! Not to mention having to ask someone to give us a jump. To avoid anyone catching on to the fact that he is a cheap bastard who won’t spring for a battery, he tries to ask different people for jumps. If he knows he’s already asked his brother and his best friend, then he’ll make sure he asks his mom or a neighbor for the jump, so that it just looks as if he is having a temporary problem and doesn’t actually do this kind of thing all the time.

Sometimes I wonder if he enjoys having people seeing him under the hood, like it shows off his manliness or something. But then I think, “No, he’s just cheap.”

When my parents came to visit for the holidays, he offered them our good car so they didn’t get stuck jumping the car.  He used his car and still hadn’t bought a new battery, so, everywhere we went he had to ask people for a jump. I was mortified that he didn’t spring for a new battery.  This has been going on for three seasons. Here we are, sitting in the car in the middle of winter, freezing, waiting for him to find a kind stranger who is willing to take the time to pull their car over to ours to jump start it. He even called my parents to bring over the working car to jump start the other car one time. Humiliating. 

 

On Christmas morning, Chris went to lift the wrapped gift under the tree that was labeled as a present to him from my parents. He pulled a muscle in his back trying to pick it up, it was so heavy. He unwrapped it to reveal a brand-new battery for his car.

Of course, it’s now two months later, and he still hasn’t installed it.

If he doesn’t get a grip on the situation, he’s going to have a different kind of battery to worry about….. assault and battery!

– Courtney, Norco CA

 

Professional Price Adjuster

My husband is a PPA:  Professional Price Adjuster – you know the person who wants to get the lowest price possible on a product.

My husband is very organized when it comes to his price adjustment business.  He has a file folder for all the receipts he gets – one for each day of the month.  When he makes a purchase at any store, he asks what the policy is on price adjustments.  If a product he purchases goes on sale within 14-30 days from the time he purchases it, he wants a refund on the difference. 

Many of us do this with high-end items like cameras or computers.  If a camera goes on sale from $300 to $250, of course we want to get that $50.  My husband goes a little further than that, though.  He wants price adjustments on everything he buys.  Everything from toothpaste to furniture – my husband wants a price adjustment.  If a store has a 30-day policy, my husband will call on the 29^th or 30^th day to see if something has gone on sale. 

 

If my husband makes a purchase on something like a power tool and a store doesn’t offer price adjustments, my husband will not even take the power tool out of the box until 30 days later.  He’ll call the store every week to check if the tool went on sale.  If it has gone on sale, he’ll drag me down to the store and ask me to purchase the tool again while he goes to the customer service counter to return the one he bought.  All of this hassle of driving to a store 25 minutes away just to save a few bucks! 

We live out on a farm which is at least 25-30 minutes away from the nearest town.  When you calculate the amount of money my husband spends on gas just to get a price adjustment, sometimes he just breaks even!

One day I overheard my 14-year-old daughter on the phone calling a store to check on the price of a pair of shoes…

“I know you have a 30 day policy, but it’s only been 31 days.  Can I still get the price adjustment?” she begged the store employee on the other line. 

Great!  Now my husband has taught my daughter how to be a Professional Price Adjuster.  She even has her own little file folder…

– Dorine, Orlando FL

The Guy that Keeps on Gifting

I can’t remember the last time my husband actually purchased a gift for someone. He is world’s best (or should I say worst?) re-gifter.

I used to get upset about it. Really upset. But then I realized it was actually sort of amusing and fascinating to watch him in action with his re-gifting. It goes beyond being a cheapskate and into territory that borders some sort of demented brilliance.

What enables him to do this is the fact that he is the type of person who believes he really does have everything he needs and he doesn’t need anything else in his life.

 

What he does is, when he receives a gift from someone, if it’s wrapped, he opens it just enough to reveal what is inside the wrapping. The wrapping paper is left intact, with no rips or other signs that it has been opened. He thanks the person who gave it to him, then the gift is labeled with a sticky note that indicates what the item is, who the giver was, when it was given to him and the approximate cost of the item. The sticky notes are color coded: different hues are used to indicate whether the present came from a family member, friend, co-worker or stranger. That way, he’s able to avoid re-gifting it back to the person who gave it to him in the first place. With few exceptions, he basically doesn’t even keep any presents given to him. All gifts immediately go into this re-gifting process.

 

They’re stored in large plastic containers with lids that are kept in our garage until a birthday, wedding or other gift-necessitating event comes along.

 

This system served him well until just recently, when my husband the expert re-gifter crossed paths with his new secretary, the expert re-packager. Her thing is to reuse the boxes from the gifts she receives by putting other items in them. Normally, at worst, this kind of thing would be annoying, because you’re not actually getting what the box makes you think you’re getting. Sometimes that’s good, sometimes not.

 

This past Christmas, she gave my husband a special gift that she’d had embroidered, but she packed it in a box that originally had a chenille blanket in it.

We actually didn’t find out about his secretary’s nice gift until a few days later, when my mother opened her gift from my husband. Instead of getting the beautiful blanket that was featured in the photo on the box, she was perplexed to have received a golf shirt….. with HIS initials embroidered on it. – Mary, Nashville TN

60-Day Man

Around my house, my husband Charlie is called “60 Day Man.”

He’ll purchase a mattress that has a 10-year warranty, keep it for 9 years and 11 months, then return it during the last month to get a new one. He doesn’t just do it with mattresses though. He does it with vacuum cleaners, washers, dryers, blenders, air conditioners, heaters, DVD players and stereo equipment. (How he is able to keep track of all those deadlines, I’ll never know.)

Last January, after the really bad rainstorms, our house and our neighbors’ homes got flooded. We needed to purchase a wet/dry vacuum to clean all the floors.

We shopped around, but a high-powered one cost more than $500. Renting one would be too expensive as well.

Charlie just happened to see one advertised in an infomercial, which was guaranteed risk-free, in a “try it for 60 days, return if not completely satisfied” promotion.

He ordered it, got it three days later, used it to clean our entire house, which took two days, then he rented it out to our neighbors to clean their houses as well.

After all the neighbors had cleaned their carpets with it, he called the company and told he didn’t like the vacuum. The company took the machine back and refunded his money. On top of getting free use of the wet/dry cleaner, he earned an extra $300 by renting it to all the neighbors on our block.

What a freakin’ cheap bastard. – Cindy, Huntington Beach CA

Code Breaker

My husband Mike is a master at being a cheap bastard and, apparently, a master code breaker. He’s managed to come up with a way for our son, who’s off studying in Europe, to communicate with us for free.

Since Mike’s too cheap to pay for Internet access and he certainly will not pay for a high phone bill, he’s devised a most unusual scheme.

He tells our son to call collect using different names to communicate different messages. There’s one name just to indicate that he is doing fine– Phil Ing Fine. Another name to indicate that he is traveling on the weekend– Seymour Rhodes. And even an elaborate way to indicate the time and date of his arrival when flying. He uses the alphabet to indicate the time he is coming in. For example, David Plane. The D being the fourth in alphabet, indicating time at four o’ clock. And “plane” referring to his method of transportation.

Of course, no matter what the name used, Mike declines the collect calls, but the relevant messages come across.

Unfortunately, one time my cousin Evan Carr called collect from jail to ask us to help him out, but my husband thought it was our son calling to inform us that he’d be driving in at 3:00. My poor cousin sat in jail for several days.   - Morgan, Detroit MI