Guess you aren't quite living up to your namesake....
Green was mainly interested in business, and there are many tales (of various degrees of accuracy) about her stinginess. She never turned on the heat nor used hot water. She wore one old black dress and undergarments that she changed only after they had been worn out. She did not wash her hands and rode an old carriage. She ate mostly pies that cost fifteen cents. One tale claims that she spent a night looking for a lost stamp worth two cents.
Green made much of her business at the offices of the Seaboard National Bank in New York, surrounded by trunks and suitcases full of her papers; she did not want to pay rent for an office. Later unfounded rumors claimed that she ate only oatmeal she heated on the office radiator. Possibly because of the stiff competition of the mostly male business environment and partly because of her usually dour dress sense (due mainly to frugality, but perhaps ascribable in part to her Quaker upbringing), she was given the nickname the "Witch of Wall Street". However, she was a successful businesswoman who dealt mainly in real estate and invested in railroads, in addition to lending money; on several occasions the City of New York came to Hetty in need of loans to keep the city afloat, most particularly during the Panic of 1907; she wrote a check for $1.1 million and took her payment in short-term revenue bonds. Keenly detail-oriented, she would travel thousands of miles—alone, in an era when few women would dare travel unescorted—to collect a debt of a few hundred dollars.
Her frugality extended to family life. Her son Ned broke his leg as a child, but Hetty took him away from the hospital when she was recognized. She tried to treat him at home, but the leg contracted gangrene and had to be amputated — he ended up with a cork prosthesis. When he moved away from his mother to manage the family's properties in Chicago and, later, Texas, he became something of a philatelist, who formed one of the finest stamp collections ever in private hands. In middle age, he returned to New York; his mother would pass her final months with him. Ned ultimately married his long time "housekeeper," Mabel, of whom Hetty wholeheartedly disapproved.
Her daughter Sylvia lived with Hetty until her thirties. Hetty disapproved of all of Sylvia's suitors because she suspected they only wanted to get their hands on her money. When Green finally let Matthew Astor Wilks marry Sylvia on February 23, 1909 after a two-year courtship, the groom waived his right to inherit Sylvia's fortune, and received US$5,000 for signing this prenuptial agreement. (Wilks, a minor heir to the Astor fortune, entered the marriage with US$2,000,000 of his own, enough to assure Hetty that he wasn't simply gold-digging.)
When her children left home, Green moved repeatedly among small apartments in New York, New Jersey, and Vermont, mainly to avoid establishing a residence permanent enough to attract the attention of tax officials in any state.
In her old age she began to suffer from a bad hernia but refused to have an operation because it cost $150. She suffered many strokes and had to rely on a wheelchair. She also became afraid that she would be kidnapped and made detours to evade the would-be pursuers. She began to suspect that her aunt and father had been poisoned.
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