There's frugal, and then there's Hetty Green

When Hetty Green (1834-1916) died in a shabby New York apartment, her net worth was estimated at about $2 billion in today’s dollars. Hetty was mainly interested in business, and there are many tales about her stinginess. She never turned on the heat nor used hot water. She wore one old black dress and undergarments that she changed only after they had been worn out. She did not wash her hands and rode an old carriage. She ate mostly pies that cost fifteen cents. One tale claims that she spent a night looking around her home for a lost stamp worth two cents.

Green made much of her business at the offices of the Seaboard National Bank in New York, surrounded by trunks and suitcases full of her papers; she did not want to pay rent for an office. It was claimed that she ate only oatmeal she heated on the office radiator. Possibly because of the stiff competition of the mostly male business environment and partly because of her usually dour dress sense (due mainly to frugality, but perhaps ascribable in part to her Quaker upbringing), she was given the nickname the "Witch of Wall Street". She was a successful businesswoman who dealt mainly in real estate, invested in railroads, and lent money. The City of New York came to Hetty in need of loans to keep the city afloat on several occasions, most particularly during the Panic of 1907; she wrote a check for $1.1 million and took her payment in short-term revenue bonds. Keenly detail-oriented, she would travel thousands of miles – alone, in an era when few women would dare travel unescorted – to collect a debt of a few hundred dollars.

Her frugality extended to family life. Her son Ned broke his leg as a child, and Hetty tried to have him admitted in a hospital charity ward. When she was recognized, she stormed away vowing to treat the wounds herself. The leg contracted gangrene and had to be amputated—he ended up with a cork prosthesis.

In her old age she began to suffer from a bad hernia but refused to have an operation because it cost $150. She moved back and forth from cheap apartment to cheap apartment in New York and New Jersey to avoid paying local taxes. She died at home, refusing to pay for an ambulance or doctor’s visit.

And what of Hetty’s two children? Her son Ned inherited half of her estate, and blew most of it living an extraordinarily extravagant lifesytle. But, when her daughter Sylvia died in 1951, she left all but $1 million of the $800 million she inherited from Hetty to 64 charities, including colleges, churches, and hospitals.