If there ever was a penny pincher, it was my father. We were definitely far from poor. He was a rich lawyer, and he knew it, yet to hear him talk about it, you would think he was a penniless pauper. I did not want to stay in four star hotels or anything, but the discount cheap hotels that he put us in made me long for the comforts of a hovel. They were awful. We stayed in so many fleabag hotels just to save 10 or 20 dollars a night, that by the time I was 13, I knew several species of rats by name.