A Tightwad and His Money

Let me pause and reflect for a moment on my Dad and his relationship to money. Everyone in our family was well aware that he was very careful with his money and didn't like spending it. 

I knew that years earlier he had rejected moving to an independent living place because he was afraid they might run out of money. Plus they liked to go on vacations and that took money too. 

To give you a sense of how this operated: Most of my childhood we camped. This meant we went a lot of places, but we did so very cheaply. My mom never got a break from cooking and washing up. The year I turned 16 we took a month long trip to the Grand Canyon and north to Bryce and Zion. We spent one night in a hotel for this trip and that only because we wanted to take the Silverton-Durango narrow gauge train. 

My mom would, to this day, want me to point out that on somethings (books for one) Dad could be pretty free with his money. She worked a series of less than appealing jobs throughout my late elementary years and onwards so she could have carpet that wasn't black. 

One reason I knew that I needed to be on their accounts was that my dad would continue to resist paying the extremely high payments to the Garden. What would happen if he refused to pay? He still was very slow to show me their financial documents and I still wasn't sure quite what I had to work with in terms of income and savings.