He Spent All His Savings to Save Me

1 At thirty-five, I was a financial wreck, living paycheck to paycheck and blowing each one on trendy restaurants or concert tickets within days. After five years, I had no savings. When I got sick, I could not afford treatment. I died in a hospital bed, full of regret.

Reborn, I vowed to save. But as soon as my salary arrived, the urge to spend took over. I turned to credit cards, and only when I faced a twenty five thousand dollar statement did I realize I needed someone to manage my money.

But who would take on such a job?

My best friend mentioned her cousin Simon, and a light went on. Simon was a finance director famous for his frugality. He split bills to the soda, kept hotel toiletries, and sold raffle prizes the same night. At thirty-five, he was still single. His penny pinching scared everyone away.

I put down my bubble tea, a plan forming. A meticulous finance director obsessed with saving. He was the personal money manager I had been searching for.

He was exactly what I needed.

My best friend thought Id lost my mind.

"What do you even see in him?" she asked, bewildered. "Are you excited for him to take you on dates to Taco Bell? Or to make you go Dutch on everything?"

"You don't get it," I said, my eyes gleaming. "I need someone to control my spending. I just can't do it myself."

She sat across from me, frowning. "Then find a normal guy! Simon has a problem! It's like a compulsion!"

I just grinned. "Isn't that perfect? I'm a spender, he's a saver. We'll balance each other out."

She rolled her eyes. "You two get together, and I guarantee he'll be logging the cost of your morning bagel into a spreadsheet. You know that, right?"

I took a long sip of my tea and nodded enthusiastically. "I know. That's why I need him."

When my parents found out, their reaction was even stronger.

"Simon? You mean the guy who's so cheap he made the local news?" My mother nearly fainted. "Chloe, sweetie, you're already so extravagant. If you get with a guy like that, you'll be fighting every single day!"

My dad had a slightly different take. "Being responsible with money is a good thing," he mused, "but he does take it to an extreme."

I wrapped my arms around my mom, trying to win her over. "Mom, think about how much money I've wasted over the years. I need someone who can keep me in check."

"But not a complete Scrooge!" she lamented, sinking into the sofa in despair.

I ignored their protests and had my friend set up a dinner for me and Simon.

For our first meeting, I chose a budget-friendly dinerabout twenty dollars a person. Simon was even more handsome than I'd expected: tall, slim, with sharp features behind a pair of glasses. He wore a faded navy-blue sweater.

The first thing he did after sitting down was pull out his phone and open the calculator app.

"This place averages twenty dollars a head, according to Yelp," he stated. "The most recommended dishes are the spicy fish and the sweet and sour pork. For two of us, two entrees and a soup should be plenty. We can keep the total under fifty. Does that work for you?"

I was stunned for a second. Not because he was being cheap, but because it was such a relief.

He had no idea how much anxiety a menu usually gave me. I always wanted to order everything, but my budget was limited, and I almost always overspent. Now, here was someone who had done all the math for me, right down to the final total.

I didn't have to think at all.

I nodded shyly. "Okay. I trust your judgment."

After dinner, he walked me home. Standing at the entrance to my apartment building, I took a deep breath.

"Simon," I said, my courage wavering. "I'd like to try with you."

He pushed his glasses up his nose. "Try what?"

My face grew hot. "Dating."

Simon was silent for three full seconds. Then he spoke. "I'm open to that. But first, we need to sign a financial agreement."

I thought he was joking.

He wasn't.

The next day, he emailed me a "Relationship Financial Management Agreement." It stipulated that both parties would cover their own daily expenses, and all shared costs would be split 50/50. Each month, both parties were required to save no less than 30% of their income, with proof of savings subject to mutual review. Any non-essential purchase over fifty dollars required prior notification and justification. Neither party was to give the other gifts exceeding one hundred dollars, with a holiday gift budget capped at fifty dollars.

If either party violated these terms, they would be required to pay the other 200% of the difference as a penalty.

I stared at the document for a full ten minutes. Then, I burst out laughing.

This man was completely serious. He wasn't trying to take advantage of me.

He just wanted to manage my money.

On our first official day of dating, Simon took over my finances.

He had me show him everything: all my bills, my credit card statements, my payment apps. After reviewing them, he was silent for a full minute. "Chloe."

I couldn't bring myself to look up. Twenty-five thousand dollars in debt was, admittedly, a bit beyond my ability to repay.

His voice rose, but he didn't mention the debt. Instead, he pointed at my order history. "You spent over a hundred and fifty dollars on bubble tea last month?"

"I think so" I wished the floor would swallow me whole.

"One a day?" he asked, and I could hear him gritting his teeth.

I mumbled, "Sometimes two."

He took a deep breath and scribbled a line in his notebook: "Bubble tea: limited to two per week, maximum four dollars per cup."

I scrambled over, trying to snatch the notebook away. "You might as well just kill me."

Simon held the notebook out of my reach, looking down at me. "You spend a hundred and fifty a month on tea. That's nearly two thousand a year. If you saved that money, in three years you'd have enough for a down payment on a small condo."

My mouth fell open, but no words came out.

He was right.

In the weeks that followed, I learned what true budgeting really meant. He helped me cancel two streaming subscriptions I never used. He turned off the auto-renew feature on all three of my food delivery apps. He disabled push notifications for every shopping app on my phone.

He even created a new lunch plan for me. The company cafeteria offered a meat and two-veg special for five dollars. It was healthy and cheap. I'd always found the cafeteria food disgusting and had never once eaten there. He joined me for lunch every day for a week, and I had to admit, it wasn't half bad.

In the first month, my spending dropped by a thousand dollars compared to the month before.

I stared at the positive balance in my bank accounta first for meand my eyes welled up.

This time, I finally had money. This time, I wouldn't die in a hospital bed because I was broke.

The next day, I went for a full medical check-up. The results came back perfect. To celebrate, I treated myself to a spicy noodle soup that night. But after just a few bites, I was hit with a violent bout of food poisoning. My fever shot up to 102.

By the middle of the night, I couldn't take it anymore. I called Simon.

He was at my door in twenty minutes. The first thing he did wasn't ask how I was. He glanced at my takeout history on my phone. "What did you eat tonight?"

I clutched my stomach, a cold sweat breaking over my body. "Spicy noodle soup"

Simon shoved the phone in front of my face, his expression grim. "Again? You just had that last Friday. I told you, you need to cut back on that stuff. It's unhealthy and it's not cost-effective."

I was delirious with fever, and hearing him talk about cost-effectiveness sent a surge of anger through me. "Simon, I'm dying here, and you're still talking about money?"

His tone was calm, almost clinical. "I'm not talking about money. I'm helping you analyze the cost-benefit. If you go to the ER now, the visit will be at least five hundred dollars. Do you even have that in your health savings account?"

I turned my head away, refusing to answer. After a minute, I heard him sigh. "Fine. I'll take you to the hospital."

I slapped his hand away. "I'm not going! All you care about is money!"

Simon stood frozen, his eyes turning a little red. "Chloe, if I only cared about money, I wouldn't have a taxi waiting downstairs with the meter running."

I blinked. Peeking out the window, I saw the flashing hazard lights of a cab parked by the curb.

"Let's go," he said, reaching for my hand again. This time, I didn't pull away.

At the hospital, he was a whirlwind of efficiencyregistering, paying, picking up prescriptions. I sat in a chair in the treatment room, an IV drip in my arm.

By three in the morning, my fever had broken and my head was clear. I watched him dozing in the uncomfortable plastic chair beside me, and a wave of guilt washed over me. "Simon."

"Hmm?" He opened his eyes.

"I'm sorry. I shouldn't have yelled at you earlier."

"It's okay." He paused. "But I still have to say it: that noodle soup was not a good value. Ten dollars for a meal that makes you sick. The hospital visit cost over five hundred dollars. Your total cost for that one meal was nearly six hundred. That's enough to cover our cafeteria lunches for half a month."

I looked at his dead-serious expression and didn't know whether to laugh or cry. "Can't you just be a little concerned about my health?"

Simon reached out and felt my forehead. "Your health is fine now. But your spending habits are not. If you don't change them, this will happen again."

He pulled a thermos from his bag and handed it to me. "Drink some warm water. The IV will make your hands cold."

I took the thermos, and the last bit of my irritation melted away.

This was just his way of caring for me.

A year passed just like that.

For our first anniversary, I decided to buy Simon a new phone. He'd been using the same one for five years; the screen was so cracked he'd put tape over it to hold it together.

While he was in the shower, I took his old phone to transfer the data. That's when I saw it: a transfer record for two thousand dollars.

Two thousand?

I froze. Simon's total monthly expenses were never more than a few hundred dollars. Where did this transfer come from?

I glanced towards the bathroom but decided not to ask him yet. I put the old phone back where I found it and said nothing about the new one. But over the next few days, I started paying attention.

I discovered a recurring transfer every month. The amounts variedsometimes a thousand, sometimes fifteen hundred, but the two-thousand-dollar one was the largest. The recipient was always the same account.

What was stranger was that after every transfer, he would delete the confirmation text from the bank.

He was hiding something from me.

My mind started racing. Did someone in his family need money for medical bills? But he'd never mentioned anything.

Was he seeing another woman? The thought made my stomach twist into a knot. But no, that didn't make sense. Simon wouldn't even splurge on a movie ticket for our dates. How could he possibly afford to support another woman?

What was it, then?

I wracked my brain until one possibility emerged. Was he paying back an ex-girlfriend? I remembered my friend telling me that when he and his last girlfriend broke up, he'd given her an itemized list of shared expenses. Maybe she was turning the tables on him?

All these theories battled in my head, keeping me up for nights.

Finally, I couldn't take it anymore. We were eating at a cheap food stall one evening when I just came out with it.

"Simon, who are you sending money to every month?"

The hand holding his chopsticks froze mid-air. "You went through my phone?"

I shook my head, fighting the lump in my throat. "I'm willing to live this frugal life with you, but are you giving all our money to some other woman?"