Careful to a fault

My parents and grandparents were heavily influenced by the Great Depression.  I’ve always thought that while I appreciated their teaching me to be careful (also known as parsimonious or just plain cheap), I was grateful to have escaped the more extreme manifestations of care that they showed, such as slicing the mold from bread to make a sandwich, or saving 30 years worth of twist ties.  Then today I had to change the word “wasn’t” to “wouldn’t” on the computer, and I found myself carefully maneuvering the cursor to take out just the ‘-as-‘ in “wasn’t” because the other letters could all be used for “wouldn’t”.  What’s really scary about this is that I probably do it all the time without noticing, but today I mis-moused, taking out the ‘w’ by accident, and was genuinely distressed to have wasted a perfectly good letter .