Talking Points

• Sometimes one pays most for the things one gets for nothing.—Albert Einstein

• “Retirement, we understand, is great if you are busy, rich, and healthy but then, under those circumstances, work is great too.” —William E. Bill Vaughan

• Only President of the Continental Congress John Hancock and Charles Thomson, secretary, signed the Declaration of Independence on the 4th of July (the former in a hand “large enough for King George to read without his spectacles”). Most delegates didn’t sign it until August 2. One didn’t sign until 1781.

• A Wall Street Journal Online/Harris Interactive Personal Finance Poll found that more than eight out of 10 (83%) U.S. adults are involved in serious relationships with income disparities, with only 10% saying they earn the same as their spouses/partners. Three-quarters (75%) of survey respondents said that at least some proportion of the disagreements with their spouses/partners involve money or household finances, though only 9% said it was all or most of those spats; just 19% said it was about half; and 47% said those were “very few.”

• In a survey of 1541 people conducted by Visa, approximately 35% of respondents spend one hour paying their bills on a monthly basis while 29% spend 2 hours or more. Interestingly, the survey finds that men take longer each month to pay their bills than women (35% of men say it takes them at least two hours each month to pay their bills, compared with 29% of women).

• Why do we say that interchangeable choices are the “same difference?” How can differences be the same?