Person Facts About Money

There are two credit cards for every person in the United States.

Just one in three consumers pays off his or her credit card bill every month.

Money can buy happiness, but researchers have found that its emotional well-being benefits max out at a salary of about 75K a year.

The key to happiness is spending your money on experiences rather than possessions, according to studies.

Offering people money for doing well on IQ tests causes them to score significantly higher. A meta-analysis found that financial incentives can boost scores by up to 10 points on average, with some studies showing even larger gains. This suggests IQ tests measure motivation and effort, not just raw intelligence.

FedEx was days from collapse. $5,000 left in the bank. Founder Fred Smith flew to Las Vegas and bet it all at blackjack. By morning he had $32,000. Just enough to keep the planes flying one more week. In that week, he closed an $11 million deal. FedEx now makes over $90 billion a year.

In 1975, advertising executive Gary Dahl invented the Pet Rock. Each one was a smooth stone from Rosarito Beach, Mexico, packaged in a cardboard box with air holes and a 32-page instruction manual. He sold 1.5 million of them at $3.95 each and became a millionaire within six months.

In 2009, Brian Acton applied to work at Facebook and was rejected. He also applied to Twitter and was turned down. He tweeted about both rejections. Then he co-founded WhatsApp with Jan Koum. In 2014, Facebook bought WhatsApp for approximately $19 billion — making Acton a billionaire and turning his rejection into one of the most expensive hiring mistakes in corporate history.

A secretary in Dallas kept making typing errors, so she started painting over them with white tempera paint. She offered the idea to IBM - they said no. She built Liquid Paper into a company doing $38 million a year. Gillette bought it for $47.5 million. Her son was in The Monkees.

Jeff Bezos has one of the tallest residential fences in America at his Beverly Hills estate. It violates local height ordinances. Instead of taking it down, he pays roughly $1,000 in fines every month. The fine is pocket change for a man worth over $200 billion - so the fence stays.

In 2005, graffiti artist David Choe was hired by Sean Parker to paint murals inside Facebook's first office in Palo Alto. He was offered $60,000 in cash. He took stock options instead. When Facebook went public in 2012, his shares were worth approximately $200 million.

In 1965, French lawyer André-François Raffray agreed to pay 90-year-old Jeanne Calment a monthly fee for her apartment in Arles — he'd get it when she died. Calment lived to 122 years and 164 days, becoming the oldest verified person in history. Raffray died in 1995 at age 77, having paid more than double the apartment's value. His widow was legally required to keep paying until Calment finally died in 1997.

In 1996, Denise Rossi won $1.3 million in the California lottery. Eleven days later, she filed for divorce from her husband of 25 years to hide the money. Three years later, he found out by accident. A judge ruled she committed fraud and gave him 100% of the winnings. If she had just been honest, she would have kept at least half.

Dale Schroeder worked as a carpenter at the same Iowa company for 67 years. He never married. He drove a rusty old Chevrolet. When he died in 2005, nobody could believe he had secretly saved $3 million. He left it all to send 33 complete strangers to college. They call themselves "Dale's kids."

In 1995, Patrick Combs got a promotional check for $95,093.35 in junk mail. He endorsed it with a smiley face and deposited it at an ATM as a joke. The bank cleared the full amount. It turned out the fake check accidentally met every legal requirement of a real one. Six lawyers told him the money was legally his. He returned it anyway.

Roy Pearson, an administrative law judge in Washington D.C., sued a family-owned dry cleaner for $54 million over a lost pair of pants. He argued their "Satisfaction Guaranteed" sign was a legally binding unlimited warranty. He cried on the stand. He lost the case. Then he lost his judgeship. Then he got suspended from practicing law.

Joan Ginther won the Texas lottery four times between 1993 and 2010, collecting $20.4 million. The odds of one person doing that by chance - roughly 1 in 18 septillion. Investigators later discovered she had a PhD in statistics from Stanford and had been studying scratch-off distribution patterns.