Here are a couple pieces I ran into today that I thought were worth sharing:

Sales of existing homes fell 8.6 percent, far more than expected, to an annual rate of 4.49 million in November, from a downwardly revised pace of 4.91 million in October. The median sales price fell 13.2 percent — the largest amount on record — to $181,300, from $208,000 a year ago.

That was the lowest price since February 2004 and the biggest year-over-year drop on records going back to 1968. The drop in home prices was probably the largest since the Gre

Following in the spirit of my post titled Six Times It's Easy to Ask for a Discount, Smart Money has a piece on five times haggling is likely to pay. Here's their list as well as how you can save in each area:

1. Medical bills

Doctors, labs and other medical providers are often willing to negotiate, with both uninsured patients and those whose insurance only covers a portion of their health expenses.

Pay cash upfront. Doctors may offer you the same low rate that they charge insurance companies, if not an even cheaper fee if you agree to pay them at the time of the appointment.

Compare costs. Check your provider's rates against those of other doctors in the area.

2. Retail stores

Point out flaws

The Wall Street Journal has a discussion on how families divide up financial responsibilities, so I thought it would be fun to tell how we do things in our family.

Who handles the finances in our family starts with the bigger list of who does what when all the household chores are listed. For instance, who does the cooking (my wife), the cleaning (the kids, mostly), any outside work such as lawns, garden, snow removal, garbage (me), and so on? In addition, we have to consider who is able to do the assigned task (if any special skills/abilities are needed.)

That said, here's how we divide up our financial chores:

I develop an annual budget, then my wife and I meet to discuss/approve it. That serves as our framework for what we will and won't do financ

Here's a piece from Business Week that says in 15 top U.S. cities, the more you make, the more time you probably spend commuting to work. In other words, the high earners generally don't live in an urban area, they live in the suburbs and need to take a car, train or some other form of transportation to get into work each day. Here's a summary of the situation:

The study also suggests that there is a link between salaries and the time people spend in a car, bus, or train each morning. The poorest people in these urban metro areas have the shortest commutes. In the Boston metro area, for example, people earning less than $20,000 a year commute typically commute 17.3 minutes each way compared with people earning $50,000 to $60,000, who commute 30.8 minutes. Commute tim