We must be careful about money, if you are careful about money then there is no problem if people call you stingy because some people's job is to say bad things about others.
You wrote a lot, but actually everything fits in one or two sentences. People who constantly listen to others about anything, including personal finances, really have a big problem in life. Everyone should use their money the way they think is best, and nobody cares if I will spend everything I have on a trip around the world, or if I will keep all the money under the mattresses.
What other people say is completely irrelevant, after all, how can they even talk about such things if they don't know how much money you actually have? I don't talk about such things with my neighbors or acquaintances, and just as it doesn't concern them how much money I have and what I do with it, I personally don't care what they do with their money either.