None of this is even an exaggeration in any way

I've seen this a lot in my life. People who are never going to be hungry or will never end up homeless treat the prospect of giving anyone else any amount of money as if it would bankrupt them. People in your life who are poor or have been poor, will just help you

I've seen obvious blue collar workers hand people their own groceries they bought on public transit without the other person even asking
I've never seen any of my dozens of tech friends other than the one that's a communist ever give a homeless person any money or buy them any food when asked
- I'm glad I don't see any of the techie guys I knew from college because they all behave this way, and also have the very obnoxious belief that anyone less successful than them has earned their lot in life. I have one friend who still sees them and I laugh whenever I hear about them racking up insane bills at a restaurant, completely oblivious to how it feels for the normal people they then demand to bill split with. They even charged my friend his share of a hotel stay for a trip he had to back out of, just insane shit
- I used to wait tables and we had a regular who was a prominent local retail estate agent (like, multiple billboards with her face on them prominent). Everyone hated getting sat with her because she would insist on being sat in the party room by herself or with one person she was with (I guess she was too good for a table next to another customer's table) and you'd basically have to split your attention between two sections, neglecting your actual section that your other tables were in, inevitably leading to reduced tips from that section.
  Then after like an hour and a half when she finally left she'd consistently tip one dollar. On top of being a ton of extra work, you'd generally net lose income for waiting on her.
As a former poor person, I have no issue with buying my coworkers and friends the next round or paying for the uber. But you can bet your grandmothers ass that I will file an expense claim to my employer for that 2$ patch cable I needed.

this is the way. ive got some friends ive known for like 15 years. we pay for each others shit all the time. where's the debt stand? idk man probably $1000 one way or the other but none of us could tell you which
- “It all comes out in the wash” is a common saying in my family. But our family also has a mooch/thief that everyone knows not to lend money too so that saying clearly has a boundary somewhere.
- Same with my friends. It doesn't help that we like to make it as complicated as possible between the three of us by always swapping who's buying for who and "trading" debt (all in good fun, none of this penny counting venmo bullshit)

had a friend of a friend offer me and my two friends a slice of pizza. before we could even finish bro pulled out the calculator app on his iphone 15 to determine we all needed to add him on venmo to send 94 cents each. next time i saw him he talked about taking cruise ships every summer

you guys should hit him with hammers
- 94 times
that's how the sigma affords the iPhone 15 and the cruise ships
How do you think he paid for the cruises? That's right, pizza money
"friend"
I'd have just cracked up at the obvious absurdity of it
If he insisted, I'd have laughed harder and then left
i would have told him to suck it and let that be the last time i ever saw him
this is absolutely an overreaction, but my first thought was "wall"

I am really really really really really really really bad with money and wish I had more just so I could buy things for people to make them happy

I"ve only ever wanted to make other people happy and feel bad that I don't have the power to do so for more people

One time when I actually did work as a barista, I purchased a regular's order for them. She got a really big smile on her face and blew me a kiss as she drove off. I really just appreciated her as a customer (and might've also been a simp, but I just love how joyful she seemed overall either way).

I try not to be that guy, but I have a lot of friends like this (will literally venmo charge you in the moment). It just makes the relationship feel transactional.

Those people wear me out
I always try to be the one that initiates a good faith system so people can get a feel for what I'm about. Worst case is someone tries to take advantage of me, but by then their (lack of) character shows up in other ways
I’ve never had a friend like this, and I never will. I don’t mean to say I haven’t met people like this, but they have no chance of becoming my friends.
Just think of that $2.82 venmo request as the cost of finding out they arent worth spending time with.
I think there’s a difference between asking for exact change and just rounding up to quickly pay someone back. It’s not immoral or anything to use venmo to square up obligations, but it does feel petty once you bust out a calculator or use exact change.

I was trying to get rid of an old nes a year or so ago and offered it to a coworker, he asked how much I wanted for it and I just told him to buy me lunch some time.

Months go by and I've totally forgotten and we're getting lunch and he's like "nah this one is on me for the NES".

I hate venmo culture so much, just have vague favors and stop counting the pennies for the love of god.

just have vague favors
"whatever you think is fair" sometimes helps for bigger things, but yeah it's an emotionally drained way to interact with people. Invoices is for companies and groups, not friends.
- I like that one too for when someone actually wants to buy something off me and I'm not really looking to make money off a friend.

The poorest people I know have always been the most generous.

It's a damn near universal constant that rich people are greedy assholes.
Sometimes you get some that are cool people who inherited a bunch of money but in general they're the scum of the earth.
Talk to any server and they'll tell you the people who roll up in fancy cars with watches worth more than a mortgage are the ones doing the math to leave exactly 12% while it's the guys on lunch break from a job site that'll leave a $10 on a $25 ticket.
- It's a damn near universal constant that rich people are greedy assholes.
  People don't always get what they want, but to get rich you have to reaaaallly want to be rich
The less certain maintaining your own personal material conditions are, the more cooperative and community-focused you become.

that's just because he respects the GRIND you PEASANT

NOW FINISH SHOVELING THE DUNG

i've seen a couple posts about this phenomena before and every time i check the comments there's people going "that's how they stay rich!" as if pocket change gave them their lake house 😭

the fact all these mfs PAY MONTHLY FOR TWITTER while emphasizing penny pinching is fucking hilarious (2nd/3rd just have the checkmark hidden, you gotta scroll past every blue to get the normal users)

Who in the hell is making $450k per year as a software developer

Probably only if you are a principle engineer at FAANG and not even these days since the tech crash. But mrah someone who is ultimately also just a laborer made more money than me so they’re the problem.
- But mrah someone who is ultimately also just a laborer made more money than me so they’re the problem
  If we're friends that regularly hang out and they ask me to cover half of the 10 dollar Uber ride that they called or my 1 beer at the bar then yes, they're the problem
  No surprise, the best tech friends I've had we never send money to each other unless it's in the order of hundreds. Anything else we just go back and forth on
  All my tech friends who were dead set on going even for everything, even the ones that have offered to pay me 2 dollars for the movie popcorn that I bought, have all turned out to be neoliberals that don't care about anybody outside of their friend groups or tech/finance social circles

I have a hard time convincing people not to pay me back to the point where I actually get really annoyed. Constant unending "oooh i can't accept blah for free blah blah blah must pay you back blah blah" SHUT UP SHUT UP

"I only accept payment in High Lifes"
- also works with joints/blunts
  or like chicken nuggets? idk thats what some of my friends did in high school
I don't like owing debts to anybody. I've known people to try and hold me over a barrel over things they've given, all the way up to people I've dated; as well as had my own generosity taken for a ride to the tune of ten grand poured down a lying cheat's gullet. I don't like letting the scale go in either direction anymore.

I live with somebody like this, i have just stopped accepting their offers because I know they'll pull some shit like this.

Had a friend in our friend group who was an asshole in this way among many others.
We'd all take turns driving places and he was consistently the only one who asked everybody else for gas money everytime he was the one that drove, also he was the one that easily drove the least, also by his math we usually owed him like $10 each for a 30 minute drive. Basically drive the car down with the gas light on, fill the tank then tell us we all had to split the gas with him.

Wait what is that $450k job I need that

https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer?countryId=254&country=254
Go get 'em tiger
- Oops! All defense firms!

You can see this along countries and cultures too; westerners are usually way more stingy than people in the global south. Middle Easterners, North Africans, South Asians, Latin Americans, etc. will constantly try to do favors for family, friends, acquaintances. Muslims will randomly offer and insist on giving people free gifts or food. I've heard Swedish people tell guests to wait in the other room while their family eats dinner.

i used to bring donuts to work every friday or every other friday at one point.. no one else ever bothered to but they were sure as hell happy to eat them all.. then it got to the point where one of the guys who was definitely making $500k+/yr bitched at me for not getting any apple fritters and that's the only kind of donut he liked
then i stopped bringing donuts in
- This made me really sad. I don't even know you, but I wish I could buy you donuts in return.
Same here in Georgia. A good 90% of the people I know from Europe and NA are stingy, whereas here, I haven't met one person who hasn't insisted on paying.
Small rant/story: there was this one guy I knew who migrated here from Europe, and I paid for his lunches for the past year, refusing to let him pay for it himself. I'd use the fact that he doesn't know the language to speak up to the cashier, and tell them in the native language that I'd be paying (worked without fail, lol). The second that I asked him to buy me some KFC and a Coffee because I didn't have enough money that day, his friends from home insisted that he start a debt list. They also tell him to refuse the gifts I give because he would then "have to make it up to me by buying gifts in return". I guess it's just more transactional culture in the west, dunno.
- there's a linguistic link between the words "author", person who writes for a living, and "authority", an entrenched structure of power.
  I think, in the beginning, the difference is knowing when to stop writing. Keeping friendly acts on a ledger is very much far far past that point.

I'm the failure in my friend group, they're all highly paid software engineers and I'm a POS factory schmuck. But I have both experiences between a few of them. One of them is cheap as shit, made his wife deal with a broken graphics card where the screen kept going black in the middle of playing for years, while my other friend keeps buying me games he wants me to play with him so I reciprocate when there's one I want him to play lol

I'm the failure in my friend group, they're all highly paid software engineers and I'm a POS factory schmuck
How did that even happen lol
- They're smart and I'm not. People can have different capabilities. I happen to be pretty limited as I'm just stupid.

Too real

I guess the silver lining is that more people seem to be starting to realize those guys are evil insufferable pricks. Basically all my life before now, the narrative would have been twisted with "no, see, he's *frugal and those behaviors are why he's rich and everyone else should emulate this"

I used to maintain a poverty skills group and I had both multiple rules and copy/paste templates about how frugality is both NOT the same and how some of it is NOT welcome either.
The "frugal" people would inevitably pull shit like benefits shame and tell people whose immediate choice was either prepare and eat perfectly edible food past the best by or starve, that "it's better to be safe than sorry." They'd also tell people who just didn't have any money in their bank account to spend more to save more. To buy a warehouse membership or stock up on sales (with what money?) then store it in their extra freezer (that they didn't own).
Dealing with "frugal" people was legit the worst part of it by far. So much more time spent on them and trying to minimize the damage their "advice" could do than trolling spamming or any other conventional bad behavior.
It's a very general term but I've come to believe "frugality" usually tends to describe well off people consciously skrimping in mostly trivial ways to give themselves extra expendable money.
People who experienced abject poverty might deliberate over every purchase even at the dollar store. But from my experience they're still generous with sharing necessary supplies and/or food with friends. It's those that are saving up for a new second car who tend to act "frugal."

except for that price, what uber price fraction is this!

Musta squeezed 10 people into the car for that price

I literally have the opposite problem with my mates. I feel that I'm two dinners in debt to them, but they'll still insist on getting the next one because I paid last time, or something.

My grandma used to say, “Always underpay or overpay a debt to friends”. It’s a way of keeping people in your life, keeping that obligation alive. Not in a manipulative way. Obviously you don’t want people talking to you out of pure obligation. Just more of a gesture indicating that we don’t plan to part ways forever.
- Is your grandma David Graeber?

I only request a payback with exact or rounded up amount if the other person is richer than me

idk how I feel about this, it's definitely not this cut-and-dried – it's situational but I've both been the friend who says no worries over coffee or food or whatever and the friend who says "hey pls pay me back the $30-50 for [movie/concert tickets, pricy thing we went in on together, etc.], thanks". but I'm also very much on the low end of income for software engineering (below six figures) and providing for a disabled spouse, which has me (probably unnecessarily) always at least low-grade stressed about money.

low end of income for software engineering (below six figures)
Yes, if you are in the US and you have been in the workforce for >1 year you are being severely underpaid, even for a low cost of living area and the current messed up job market. Check out https://levels.fyi.
It may also be that you have your reasons for staying at the place you're at but I like to let people know just in case. I was unknowingly being very, very underpaid and nearly tripled my salary after a colleague tipped me off.
- you're not wrong, but I've interviewed for higher-paying positions and it's always incredibly stressful. I also work for a very small web hosting company (literally less than 10 employees) where everyone's chill and the owner doesn't make an insane amount of money compared to the rest of us, which just feels... I dunno, less awful than working for a big company where the CEO rakes in several orders of magnitude more than I do, somehow?
Yeah I'd sooner lump you in with the barista considering cost of living.
- considering cost of living
  it's insane to me that I'm making more than I've ever made and still feel almost as poor as I did when my spouse and I were both in school and working part-time jobs. like, early-20-something me would have killed to make as much as I am now in the '10s, and it's just barely scraping by money in '20s.

Im very generous with my money and resources, I just did something cool for my friends on Friday but my friends should want to help me pay for shit. I really dont want mooch friends.

I am very ok with the vague favours regime of debt, but I also know some very generous people who have been taken advantage of too much so that they insist on paying back their debts.

Also remember my broke-ass mum basically fighting with my aunt every time it was time to pay (for the privelige of paying) for gas money.