The first winter I stayed over at my friend Dana’s apartment, she handed me a folded fleece blanket before she handed me a glass of wine. The thermostat in her hallway said 66. I glanced at it, then at her, and she laughed before I could say anything.
“I know,” she said. “It’s my dad. He lives in there.”
Her father paid the gas bill in person every month, in cash, at the utility office downtown. He knew what it cost to heat that house down to the dollar, and he knew exactly what one more degree would add. Dana makes more money now than he ever did, and she still can’t bring herself to touch the dial.
Habits like hers tend to outlast the circumstances that created them, the same way many of the lifelong habits of people who grew up with very little money stick around long after the bank account recovers.
To a guest shivering on the couch, it can look cheap. But the person holding out the blanket usually isn’t trying to save money at your expense. They’re following a set of rules they learned before they were old enough to question them.
The thermostat habit usually started with someone else’s bill
In a lot of households, the heat was never background. It was a line item somebody worried about.
The kids in those homes heard it constantly. Close the door, you’re heating the outside. Put on a sweater. Do you know what that costs? The bill came in the mail, went on the fridge, and got paid in bills pulled from an envelope. Nobody had to explain that money was tight. The children could watch it leave the house.
That worry was grounded in something real.
According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, 34 million American households, or 27%, reported trouble paying energy bills or kept their homes at unsafe temperatures because of cost in 2020.
For families like those, turning down the heat wasn’t a quirk. It was one of the few parts of the budget they could actually control.
Children pick up money habits by watching their parents
Most people don’t learn about money from a class. They learn it at the kitchen table.
Researchers at the University of Arizona surveyed 2,098 first-year college students and found that parents shaped young adults’ financial attitudes and behavior far more than work experience and high school financial education combined.
Financial psychologist Brad Klontz calls the beliefs we absorb this way “money scripts.” In a study with his colleagues, he identified four patterns, and one of them, money vigilance, reads almost like a description of Dana’s father.
People high in money vigilance tend to agree with statements like “If you can’t pay cash for something, you should not buy it” and that it’s important to save for a rainy day. Klontz and his co-authors argue these scripts form in childhood and pass down through families. Their own data didn’t prove that, though: the study measured adult beliefs, and it found no significant link between the scripts and how well-off people were growing up.
Still, Klontz encourages people to look backward. “For many of us, just being aware that we’re living out a belief that our great grandparents had can really help us transform our relationship with money,” he told CNBC.
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Paying in cash made every expense feel like a loss
There’s a reason the cash-paying generation felt every bill so sharply. Handing over physical money hurts in a way that swiping a card doesn’t.
In a well-known experiment, MIT professors Drazen Prelec and Duncan Simester found that people were willing to pay up to twice as much for the same item when told to use a credit card instead of cash. Some researchers have since questioned whether that gap has shrunk as cards and phones became the default way to pay.
But the parents in these stories weren’t paying by phone. They counted out the gas money by hand, and their kids were sitting right there while they did it.
A child who watches that every month learns that the heat isn’t free, and that every degree has a price someone in the family has to hand over. That lesson doesn’t switch off when the bill goes on autopay.
The blanket is how they take care of you without spending
The person with the cold apartment is almost never cold toward their guests. They offer the blanket, the thick socks, the hot tea, the good spot on the couch. They want you comfortable. They just want to get you there in a way that doesn’t feel like money disappearing.
Plenty of people recognize this, which is part of why it’s become a running joke.
When a Michigan mom taped a note to her thermostat, it went viral with a checklist that included “Do you pay the gas bill?” and parents flooded the comments agreeing with her.
The joke works because so many people grew up with a version of that rule. The blanket is the same instinct with better manners.
Frugal and stingy aren’t the same thing
Not everyone at 66 degrees is carrying the same thing. Some people genuinely enjoy saving. Others feel something closer to pain every time money leaves.
Scott Rick, Cynthia Cryder and George Loewenstein surveyed more than 13,000 people and found that “tightwads” outnumbered spendthrifts three to two, and respondents over 70 were five times more likely to be tightwads than spendthrifts.
The researchers drew a clear line between the two kinds of careful people. “The evidence suggests that frugality is driven by a pleasure of saving, as compared with tightwaddism, which is driven by a pain of paying,” they wrote.
That difference matters.
The frugal person feels a small satisfaction when the bill comes in low. The person driven by pain feels anxious no matter how low it comes in. Klontz has described where that anxiety can lead: “You could be so anxious around money, you hoard it and don’t enjoy life,” he told CNBC.
If someone keeps the house cold but also denies themselves nearly everything else, and no amount of savings ever feels like enough, the thermostat may be a sign of something heavier than thrift.
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The math made sense once, and it’s hard to stop running it
Dana knows her furnace won’t bankrupt her. She’s done the math many times. The problem is that she was taught the math at seven years old, by someone she trusted, in a house where it really mattered.
A lesson learned that early doesn’t feel like a belief. It feels like common sense. Turning the heat up to 70 wouldn’t just cost her a few dollars. It would mean deciding her father’s rule no longer applies to her.
So she hands out blankets instead. Her guests stay warm, and her father’s rule stays in place.
