7 Financial Facts That Will Blow Your Mind

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What does it cost to kick the bucket? What's the best tax scam if you want to avoid jail? Here are a few financial facts that may surprise you.

1. How much does it cost to die? Dying is a pricey proposition. A paper by Samuel Marshall, Kathleen M. McGarry and Jonathan S. Skinner examined how much people spend on out-of-pocket healthcare costs in the last year of their lives. Average bill? $11,618. For the top one percent, who get top-of-line care, the figure is $94,310.

And we haven’t even gotten to your actual death, which comes with funeral and other expenses. If you add in these, dying costs the average senior a whopping $50,000. With an oligopoly in health insurance and Uncle Sam barred from negotiating better prices for pharmaceuticals, the cost of dying is steadily going up, threatening family savings and adding untold stress to what is already a generally stressful experience.

2. Big banks are getting even bigger. As Bloomberg reports, the biggest U.S. banks have gotten even bigger since their risky and criminal behavior helped spark the financial crisis. The number of too-big-to-fail banks is projected to increase by 40 percent over the next 15 years. And consider this: When big banks get help from you and me, they behave worse. According to USA Today, banks that received federal assistance during the financial crisis “reduced lending more aggressively and gave bigger pay raises to employees than institutions that didn’t get aid.” Megabanks are undermining democracy, subverting the rule of law, rigging the world’s largest markets, and doing untold damage to the economy.

The vast majority of Americans, regardless of political affiliation, thinks banks are too big. Half think the 12 largest banks should be broken up. A growing number of economists and financial experts -- among them former Fed chairman Alan Greenspan and former Citi CEO Sandy Weill -- warn that unless the big banks are broken up, the economy can’t recover. President Obama is pretending that Dodd-Frank has ended too-big-to-fail, a position the Washington Post calls “ startlingly and dangerously naïve." As current Fed chairman Ben Bernanke recently put it: “Too Big To Fail is not solved and gone… It’s still here."

3. Offshore tax cheating v. stealing socks. U.S. courts are feeling very generous toward offshore tax evaders these days. Mary Estelle Curran, a wealthy 79-year-old Florida widow who failed to tell the IRS that she had $43 million stashed in offshore accounts, was sentenced to one year of probation by federal district court Judge Kenneth Ryskamp, who berated prosecutors for going after her in the first place. Then he revoked the probation altogether.

U.S. Justice Department lawyer Jack Townsend told the Wall Street Journal that the average sentence handed down in offshore cases has been less than 15 months, half the average for other types of tax-shelter schemes. Judges hand down prison sentences about half the time in such cases. In contrast, Florida man Dean Rockmore, 48, received a mandatory life sentence as a repeat offender for nabbing a $4 pair of socks from Walmart.

4. Wall Street family values. JPMorgan Chase honcho Jamie Dimon got a 19 percent pay cut in 2012 following revelations that $6 billion had gone missing from his company in the London Whale fiasco. We now know that Dimon and JPMorgan lied to investors, regulators and Congress about the bank’s risky activities. Several shareholder groups are fighting to demote Dimon by separating the CEO and chairman's job at JP Morgan.