Hey kids, you're probably familiar with at least a few characters who's obsessive penny-pinching, truly knows no bounds.

Yes, from Ebenezer Scrooge to Scrooge McDuck.

Nobody hoards money quite like misers.

But these guys aren't the most miserly misers out there, not by a long shot.

First of all, look at their top hats, their extravagant use of glasses, their luxurious chairs.

These things are worth their weight and precious shekels.

No true miser would waste their wealth on such frills.

Second of all, these guys aren't real. They're fictional characters.

Scrooge McDuck does not exist.

I don't care what CNN says; it's all liberal conspiracy bullshit.

I mean look at this article by The Huffington Post.

You mean to tell me that this picture isn't photoshopped? Ridiculous.

But you know who was real? One Daniel Dancer of London, England.

Born in 1716, Daniel's father died at a young age, leaving behind a large agricultural estate for Daniel to oversee.

When it was first inherited, the property brought in a few hundred pounds a year, which doesn't sound like much today.

But given that a general laborer could be expected to make around 19 pounds per year in 1710, it's safe to say that Dancer could afford to live a fairly lavish lifestyle off his passive income alone.

But Dan was like, you know, all this food and clothing and stuff is all right.

But you know what I really like? Owning money.

Say how much does a pound cost?

Well, that's a complicated question, Daniel.

Concurrency really be said to have intrinsic value, some economists believe.

TLDR please, they cost a pound .

Jesus, that's a lot. I better start saving.

Thus began one of the most intentionally frugal lifestyles history has ever seen.

Let me walk you through a few of Dancer's day-to-day habits.

First of all, soap, don't even think about it.

The closest thing to bathing that Daniel did was during the summer months when,

once or twice a week he'd wade into the nearby pond and scrub his face with a handful of sand.

Say what you will, but what he lacked in deodorization he certainly made up for an exfoliation.

Admittedly, all of London probably reeked high hell back then.

So while Daniel's smell might not have tipped people off to his eccentricity, his clothes almost certainly did.

On a good day he'd be seen in one of his coats, which were homemade patchwork abominations of various garments that Dancer found on the streets and local dust heaps,

looking like a walking dementia patients' sewing circle.

Similarly, all his shoes were either scavenged or Frankensteined out of other pairs of shoes he already owned,

with the whole ensemble being barely held together with haphazardly tied bands made of the hay growing on his estate.

In fact, a lot of the time he ditched normal clothes altogether and just wore the hey.

To his credit, in his youth Daniel was known to purchase a whole two shirts per year as his clothing expense.

But one day he looked in the mirror and said: Daniel, you're bleeding funds like a stuck pig. It's time to grow up and get your act together.

And cut his budget to only one shirt per year.

One of the few people that Daniel associated with regularly was a sister whom he lived with.

Believe it or not, she shared in a lot of Daniel's tight-fisted habits and it definitely showed.

She was described as "having more the appearance of a walking dunghill than one of the fair sex."

Couldn't have said it better myself, honestly.

Dancer prepared all of his food for the upcoming week ahead of time,

consisting of only 14 hard dumplings and 3 pounds of beef, stretched out over the entire seven-day period.

Every day he need only a single meal that was basically equivalent to two wads of dried out dough and one and a half quarter pound of patties from McDonald's.

He kept this habit up for years without fail except for one time,

when he stumbled upon a fully intact rotting sheep carcass during his daily stroll.

He was like, good lord, this is just obscene.

Who would leave a perfectly good pile of arguably edible meat and organs just sitting around like this?

So he dragged the thing home and made him and his sister a nice big pile of spoiled mutton pies, which they subsisted off for several weeks.

That's a real life hack right there. Who needs refrigeration if it's already rancid, am I right?

Despite Daniel's rabid fear of any unnecessary spending, he did own a dog named Bob that he was quite fond of.

At this point I'm almost certain that Dancer just decided to base his entire life off Linoleum by NOFX,

which is pretty incredible, considering Linoleum wasn't even invented for another hundred years.

Anyway, though, one day Daniel's neighbor came to complain about how Bob had been harassing his sheep.

So Daniel said: Don't worry, boy. I ain't gonna kill you.

But we don't want a lawsuit on our hands, do we?

No, we don't. But what will we do if a lawyer came around here, huh?

That's right, and make his children watch, yeah.

So he decided to take the dog to the local farrier, which is basically a blacksmith that specializes in horseshoes and the like.

Hey, could you make my dog, like, not have teeth anymore?

Uh, what kind of business you think I'm running here, boy?

Come on, man, you file down horse's hooves for a living. Teeth are just tiny mouth hooves. That's close.

Sorry buddy, but close only counts in horseshoes and hand-grenades.

Well, got me there. Say what's a hand-grenade?

None of my sources say what happened to the dog after his untimely nubbining.

But I do know Dan never got sued. So I guess the operation was a success.

Daniel's sister passed away in 1766, leaving him so distraught that he actually went out of his way to buy morning clothes for her funeral.

And by that I mean he bought a pair of secondhand black stockings and that's it.

Still that's a big deal when it comes to the likes of Dancer.

At this point the only person close to a friend that Dancer had was a woman known as Lady Tempest.

She was so influential over him that she was actually able to convince him to buy, get this, a one shilling hat.

This was quite an accomplishment as Daniel's last hat was older than half of you at 14 years old.

What? I'm not, you know...

You.

Of course, the next time Lady Tempest went to hang out with him, he was still wearing his old disgusting hat.

When questioned about the one he bought, he goes, oh yeah, that frilly old thing, sold it for a sixpence profit. super easy, too.

I tell you forget house flipping; hat flipping is gonna be the cool new thing pretty soon.

Lo and behold, two hundred and fifty years later he was wrong.

Daniel died at the ripe old age of 78, which seems pretty shocking, considering the whole not using soap, eating rotten food thing.

But I guess his near total isolation from other people made up for that when it came to preventing illness.

Though he never ended up shelling out any of the massive hoard of wealth that he accumulated over this time, his efforts weren't completely in vain.

But the time he passed away, Daniel's estate was now pulling in about 3000 pounds in yearly net revenue, ten times the amount earned when he first inherited it.

So moral of the story: parsimony has its place.

While it's good to save money, don't torture yourself just for the sake of a few bucks.

Next time your parent or significant other insists on turning down the thermostat or keeping the windows up to save gas, just say: hey are we human? Or are we dancer?