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Are you normal about money?

by Moneysense
Thursday, June 12, 2008
provided by

"The truth is, when it comes to money, people are nuts." So says New York City based author and marketing guru Bernice Kanner. To find out just how crazy we are, she hooked up with Bloomberg L.P. to survey regular folks on their everyday money habits and published the strange-but-true answers in Are You Normal About Money?

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What did she find? Well, just over 50% of us don't pay off our credit card balances every month, more than half of all college students expect to be millionaires by age 40, and an astonishing three out of ten husbands and wives haven't a clue what their spouses make. Starting to feel like your money habits aren't so bizarre after all? Check out some of these other stats from Kanner's book to see how you compare:

How big a stress is moolah in your life?


It's the biggest: right up there with job and career pressure for 22% of us.

How much do you usually carry around?

The average wallet contains $104 and change.

How often do you check stock quotes?

Forty-one percent of us see if we're whole once a day. Eighteen percent check three times a day and 15% do so even more frequently.

Got a cash cushion to break a financial fall?


Only 52% of us have money saved up outside of a work-related savings or retirement plan. It's not just poor people who live on the edge: nearly one-fifth of folks earning more than $50,000 a year don't have a penny saved.

Sex or money: which do you argue about more?

Money is the No. 1 cause of disagreements in marriages, sparking nearly twice as many rows as sex. One in seven of us feel money generates daily stress in our lives, while 29% of couples say they frequently disagree about whether to spend or save money, beating out what to watch on TV as fight fodder.

Do you and your partner keep separate accounts?

More than one-third of us (36%) have both a separate and joint account. Twenty-five percent have only a joint account. Twenty-two percent keep separate accounts. (The rest are single.)

How far would you go for $10 million?

The truth is, most of us would do just about anything. One-quarter would abandon all their friends and church, or become a prostitute for a week, or change their race or sex. And 7% — one out of every 14 of us — would even murder for that amount. Astonishingly, most of us would do all of this for as little as $3 million — but not $2 million. Go figure.

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