Before I get into this one, I should probably warn you that the origins of this word might be apocryphal (AKA, bollocks). But since I’ve never let the truth get in the way of a good story before, let’s crack on…
A skinflint is a person who’s mean with their money. Think that friend who leaves before their round in the pub, or that person who never brings booze to the party (I’m not sure why all my examples are alcohol related, sorry). Turns out humans have been being cheap for a long time, and ‘skinflint’ goes all the way back to 1699. The possibly rubbish story goes that in those days, soldiers used flints to produce the spark they needed to fire their rifles. And apparently there were some commanders so tight that they gave their soldiers shavings they’d scraped or ‘skinned’ from a flint because they didn’t want to spend extra money giving them a whole flint each. And for that they earned the nickname of, you’ve guessed it, ‘Skinflint’.
Ebenezer Scrooge is probably the most famous fictional skinflint. But there are lots of real-life tight-arses that you might not have come across before.
John Elwes (1714–1789) was a British MP and is often considered the inspiration for the character of Scrooge. He went to bed at sundown so he didn’t have to use candles, and dressed in rags instead of buying new clothes – including a beggar’s cast-off wig he found in a hedge, which he wore for two weeks.
Daniel K. Ludwig (1897–1992), an American shipping businessman, almost fired one of his tanker captains for using a paper clip on a two-page report.
Because I’m a feminist, I found one lady skinflint. Hetty Green (1834–1916), was an American businesswoman and financier known as ‘the queen/witch of Wall Street’ (depending on which journalist you read). She would apparently instruct her laundress (so she wasn’t tight enough to do her own washing) to only wash the dirty bits of her dresses and leave the rest to save on soap. There’s also a fairly vicious story that she refused to pay for a doctor to look at her son’s injured leg, which led to it being amputated. There’s loads of evidence which shows this isn’t true, and that she actually spent a lot of money getting him fixed up. But sadly the story was widely reported at the time, perhaps because the male-dominated financial industry just couldn’t cope with a woman who was better at investing than they were.
Ingvar Kamprad (1926–2018) was the Swedish billionaire founder of IKEA. It seems he was as cheap as his furniture as he flew economy class, encouraged IKEA employees to use both sides of a page when writing or printing (I mean, that’s just good for the environment), recycled tea bags, and kept the salt and pepper packets from restaurants he went to (well, those meatballs could do with a bit of seasoning).
It’s worth pointing out that one thing all these tight-wads have in common is that they were very rich. So maybe there’s something to be said for not paying for your round…