Ann Romney was less than pleased with her husband’s on-air bet with Rick Perry Saturday night, and told him so.  A masterstroke might have been Mitt Romney, millionaire businessman, offering to wash Perry’s car, if Perry could prove him wrong.  Or how about Mitt producing his book and asking Governor Perry to SHOW him the passage on  health care which was in dispute?  What are the chances Perry has actually read Romney’s book?

Instead, the wealthy Romney offered Perry a $10,000 bet in a time when any of us would take that bet just for the chance to pay off a few credit cards.

But here’s the inside on Romney: The Washington Post reports this weekend that the chances of getting $10,000 out of Mitt Romney, especially on a needless bet, is NIL.  Mitt Romney is famously frugal.  He travels coach even though he could afford a private plane.  Rather than hiring a moving company, Romney rented a U-Haul and moved himself from Massachusetts to California. Mitt Romney was raised by a financially-cautious father, former Michigan Governor George Romney.  The elder Romney ended up losing almost everything he had ever made when American Motors when under.  That left a lasting impression on young Mitt.  Ann Romney tells a story of driving Mitt’s mother to the hospital for a cancer check-up in a family station wagon that had a HOLE IN THE FLOOR. Mitt’s mother asked to be dropped off a block from the hospital so that no one would see the former First Lady of Michigan getting out of such a jalopy.  The Washington Post has even more:

“But Mr. Romney had frequently driven an inexpensive, domestic stalwart that looked out of place in the company parking lot — a Chevrolet Caprice station wagon with red vinyl seats and a banged-up front end.

It was a stark sign of the tug of war, still evident in Mr. Romney’s life, between an instinctive, at times comical frugality, and an embrace of the lavish lifestyle that accompanied his swelling Wall Street fortune.

Mr. Romney, 64, has poured $52 million of his own money into campaigns for the Senate and the White House, but is obsessed with scoring cheap flights on the discount airline JetBlue.

He has acquired six-figure thoroughbred horses for his wife, Ann, yet plays golf with clubs from Kmart. And he has owned a series of multimillion-dollar homes, from a lakefront compound in New Hampshire to a beach house in California, but once rented a U-Haul to move his family’s belongings himself between two of the vacation retreats.

Romney's Frugal Ways Might Be Useful In Washington....

Friends, co-workers and relatives describe Mr. Romney, as something of a paradox: a man exceedingly deft at and devoted to making money who has never become entirely comfortable with his own wealth.”

Interesting to note however, the Romneys are famously-generous with their church and other charities. Mitt Romney’s tax disclosures reveal that he and his wife give 10% of everything they have in tithes.

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Filed under: Economy, Featured, Inside The KC, Politics by Sonja Eddings Brown, Dec 11, 2011