The Witch of Wall Street: Hetty Green, Financial Genius and Cheapskate

Everyday a strange woman dressed in the same raggedy black dress with a glower on her face would walk down Wall Street to Manhattan's Chemical and National Bank. Her name was Hetty Green and she was one of the richest women in America.

Hetty was born to a very frugal but very wealth family in 1835. Her father was concerned she might mismanage her family fortune, and by age six she was reading the financial section to her father daily and by eight she had open her own savings account.

Hetty was so frugal that on her 21^st birthday she didn't want to light the candles on her cake complaining that it was a waste and when the guest convinced her to light them she blew them out immediately intent on returning them for a refund.

That was the same birthday that she came into a multimillion-dollar trust. Her father died almost ten years later and left her his vast estate. Hetty shrewdly invested her money and its value grew every day but that didn't stop her spendthrift ways. Hetty always wore secondhand clothes, ate only at the cheapest restaurants and vendors, used free clinics for medical care, and lived in the cheapest boarding housed to avoid paying property taxes.

Hetty's father had instilled in her a deep belief that most men would be interested in her only for her money and that left here suspicious of any man showing interest but when she was 33 she agreed to marry business man Edward Henry Green, once he renounced any claims on her money of course. Yes, Hetty had an ironclad prenuptial agreement in 1868. Not surprisingly, after two kids and a lot of grief Edward Green divorced her.

Hetty promised to make her son, Ned, the richest man in the world and saved every penny she possible could. She refused to pay to have anything laundered and went to bed at sundown to avoid using candles. She even refused to turn on the heat or use hot water.