Miser Advisor

Chuck: You're taking money from blind children?

Emerson: I suppose I could pay my bills with blind kids' smiles, but their money is a lot easier.

—Pushing Daisies

The Miser Advisor is a sub trope of Mr. Vice Guy, in that a character's main motivation for being part of the main character's circle of friends is to wring a little money out of him/her now and then. Said character will often lament the hero's lack of wealth, or berate them for spending even a little bit. After all, "a penny saved is a penny earned," and the Miser needs every little bit of cash he/she can scrounge up.

Neither the main character nor the Miser Advisor has to be obscenely rich to fall under this trope, and it's a lot better if they aren't. Otherwise, they just come off as petty and mean.

Contrast Screw the Rules, I Have Money, where the Miser Advisor already has the one thing they're looking for, and uses it against others.

Examples of Miser Advisor include:

Anime and Manga

• Nami from One Piece exhibits shades of this trope - while she has other motivations for being in the main cast, she still takes every opportunity she has to make the other members of the crew her debtors, Zoro and Usopp in particular.
• Not really a member of the main character's party per se, but in Naruto, Kakuzu from the Akatsuki is this way. Being the treasurer for the organization, he is extremely thrift and constantly tries to find ways to make money. The main reason he initially thought to partner with Hidan was because he thought that Hidan's religion would make them money.
• Mana Tatsumiya, the unreasonably frugal mercenary from Mahou Sensei Negima, who gets sketchy over 200 yen (very roughly $2.00). Her main victim is Setsuna, who she bills for her services in Demon Slaying, though she's willing to charge anyone on the team for any amount of time spent fighting.
  • Jack Rakan is much much worse; he routinely attempts to charge people millions for his services, as well as for his training for Negi. They usually get away without paying because Jack decides he's going to "send the bill" to somebody who isn't present; usually Konoka's father.
    • To be fair, in actuality he simply didn't plan on telling Negi anything until he decided that Negi was a man. But admitting that means admitting he's not as dumb as he looks. Quite. Kinda hard to tell at times.
• Revy from Black Lagoon. When it comes to her priorities, making money is a close third, being barely beaten out by her love of gratuitous violence and her desire to protect Rock.
  • Her friend Eda, on the other hand, has money as her first priority.
• Becky the Nose from Gunsmith Cats. Rally constantly owes her a lot of money, and Becky sometimes refuses to part with the information Rally needs unless our heroine buys her a pizza and a bottle of her favourite champagne.
• Particularly in fanfiction, Nabiki Tendo of Ranma ½ has some elements of this character type, but it's fairly rare she has actual advice to sell and she actively sells to everyone—in fact, the main characters, her sister and her sister's fiance, are actually the two she least offers advice to. Mostly, they pay her money to get something they desperately need at that moment in time, or to make sure she does not tell something to somebody (she usually takes their money and goes and blabs for even more money anyway).
• Sakurako from Ai Kora is a mild example. She's an average high-school girl who's smart with money, but she gets a little carried away with cost-cutting tips sometimes... She's also shown to be a sucker for sales and give-aways.
• Yu Lian of Half Prince serves as money person for the party, and later becomes finance minister for the city they receive as a tournament prize.

Literature

• Aahz from Robert Asprin's Myth series is a tightwad of the first order, even once the M.Y.T.H. Inc. crew has become successful and obscenely rich. Supposedly, this is because his mother squandered the family's money on bad investments. Unusually, doubles as The Obi-Wan.
  • In the same series we have Grimble, the Chancellor of the Exchequer for the nation of Possiltum. For the first couple of books Skeeve thinks he's just a tight-fisted jerk, but in Hit or Myth, after spending some time sitting in for King Roderick he gains some respect for Grimble, who does a very difficult and delicate job, working ungodly hours and all while living like a monk.
• In A Song of Ice and Fire Robert characterizes his advisers as being too fond of what he calls "counting coppers" and what they consider "not bankrupting the kingdom". Turns out they're right, and when Eddard arrives and reviews the financial situation he's shocked to discover that they owe massive debts to the church, the Lannisters, and the Iron Bank.

Music

• Tommy has Uncle Ernie. The movie also makes his adoptive dad one.

Religion

• Of course, there's always Judas. Remember that time a woman started washing Jesus's feet with expensive oils and rubbing them with her hair? Apparently this trope was behind Judas's insistence that they could sell the oil and give the money to the poor - because, as the Good Book points out, Judas was the one who kept the money box.
  • In the book of Mark, the woman goes a bit further - she anoints Jesus with an entire bottle of the incredibly valuable ointment of nard, worth hundreds of denarii. Plenty of people scold her for this, and Jesus tells them not to because she is showing her love for him who is only on the Earth for a short time while there is always poor people to help (which they did frequently).
  • Due to Marks version of the story, and that Judas shows no sign of this trope during the event, this is only one interpretation of events. It could even be that it was this incident that turned Judas against Jesus in the first place, if he felt it was simple greed on Jesus part.

Video Games

• Lemina, the Black Magician Girl from Lunar 2: Eternal Blue. That she also has Hair of Gold is likely a coincidence.
• Alys Brangwin from Phantasy Star IV also starts out like this, trying (and succeeding several times!) to get a little extra cash from her clients during seemingly mundane missions.
  • Hahn is the most frequent Butt Monkey of this: when he ask to accompany Alys and Chaz into the basement of the university (the first dungeon), where he actually proves useful, it costs him 100 meseta. When he asks to accompany the two to Birth Valley, it costs him 250 meseta. And on, and on...
• The financial adviser in SimCity (3000 and 4) constantly complains about your taxes, spending, and budget. S/he'll usually encourage you to cut funding to minor programs like junior sports or stairwell lighting.
• Money Bags of the games Spyro 2 and 3.
• Mail...Popful Mail...a bounty hunter who has yet to catch a single criminal, so she'll try to get extra money any way she can (especially from Namo of Treesun, whom she rescues early on).
• To a lesser extent, Yuffie from Final Fantasy VII, though only when it comes to materia rather than cash.
• Neeshka from Neverwinter Nights 2.
• The Time Goddess from Half Minute Hero. Need her to put some extra seconds on your Death Clock? She's willing to help...for a price. (If you're playing Evil Lord 30, this price is "everything in your pocket".)
• To an extent, Anise from Tales of the Abyss. Most of the reason she's interested in Luke is because she's scheming to marry into money. And it turns out that, true to type, the whole reason she's involved with the story and designated The Mole in the first place is due to her family's poverty.
• In Fable III, after your character becomes ruler of Albion, you gain an aide named Hobson. Hobson tries to encourage you to fill the treasury (in order to fund the defense of Albion from the Night Crawler's forces) by any means necessary, such as raising taxes, cutting the budget for the royal guard, or accepting a bribe to enact prohibition of alcohol, though it quickly becomes obvious that he's just obsessed with gold. Reaver takes this role as well, doing this like encouraging you to reinstate child labor or convert an orphanage/homeless shelter into a state-funded brothel.
• Tear, the fairy accountant in Recettear, berates Recette for throwing a coin in a fountain and all her other generally unsound financial practices.
• Lampshaded in The Grand List of Console Role Playing Game Cliches as the "Lemina Rule" (can appear due to Gameplay and Story Segregation).

Web Comics

• Thief from 8-Bit Theater is an extreme example of this, forcing his comrades into signing usurious contracts that grant him all of their income (as well as stealing every GP that isn't nailed to their bodies for good measure.)
  • Who are you kidding? If they nailed GP to themselves, the blood wouldn't have stopped flowing before he ripped the nails out again.

Black Mage: Didn't the pirates take everything already?
Thief: They left everything that was nailed down. I did not.

• Haley from Order of the Stick is like this too, even though it's justified as combination of habits acquired from her father and need to ransom him. A more recent strip shows that she also, indeed, does that out of plain old greed. She IS a rogue, after all.