The high cost of being cheap

Okay, I admit it: I'm the cheapest SOB who ever made soup out of a complimentary cup of hot water from McDonald’s and a free packet of ketchup. My wife and I have been married for 44 years. We've owned a total of two television sets, and our current one is a chunky box-like structure that weighs 100 pounds and has a tube in it. We can't stand the thought of buying a new TV just to see them get even cheaper next year. The last pickup we owned we drove for 25 years, and we've started taking showers every other day to cut our water bill. If I ever owned a Rolex, it would have to be a fake of a fake. I could go on like this, but I don't want to waste any more paper than is absolutely necessary to get my point across.

I got this way because I was my parents’ banker and had to pay every penny of my college education with money I made on show steers and working in the oilfields. The first apartment my wife and I lived in cost $125 a month and was above the office of a construction company. When we lived in Australia, we lived on $40 a week due to budget constraints. My first job as a ranch manager I made $650 a month, and in my second job for a livestock newspaper, I worked on commission so I stayed in motels that cost $11 a night. The first time I ever paid $100 for one night in a hotel was in New Orleans, and I didn’t sleep all night because I was mad at myself for such extravagance. With the lights out, it was no different than those $11 rooms.

My miserly ways naturally carried over when we became ranchers, and I soon discovered that it didn’t cost that much to be cheap. We leased a ranch for $12 a month per cow, which came to $144 a year, and because we began at the start of a seven-year drouth, we spent $9,000 a year on hay. That’s $219 per year per cow for feed and when we sold our calves at the auction, we got $300 per calf not counting commission and trucking. That didn’t leave a lot left over for necessities, like bulls.

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