This helpful infographic illustrates the big data behind single parent households in the U.S. Tips on saving money are also included to assist the supermoms and superdads trying to balance finances, family, and more.

Spent is an online game that's unlike virtually any other game on the internet in that it focuses on poverty and homelessness. The site, which was launched in 2011 as a collaboration between ad agency McKinney and Urban Ministries of Durham, lets users pretend that they're a single parent who's down to her last $1,000. The user must then try and support a family when only low-wage positions are available. It's an engaging and eye-opening experience.

Women get to the top of their profession easier and earn relatively more money when they choose careers not dominated by men. A study of 20 industrialized nations found that in countries where men and women worked in different occupations, there was not such pay inequality between them. The biggest inequality in pay was found to be in Japan, with Slovenia being the fairest to women.

Is it better to have a few close friends or a wider circle that’s perhaps less deep? Economic circumstances may play a part. One reason that Americans may prefer a large social network, researchers surmise, is because Americans move around a lot. Thus, it may make sense to spread time and resources across many friends to minimize the loss of any one friend moving away.

Given an invitation, women are just as willing as men to negotiate for more pay. Men, however, are more likely than women to ask for more money when there is no explicit statement in a job description that wages are negotiable, a new study shows. “We find that simple manipulations of the contract environment can significantly shift the gender composition of the applicant pool,” says University of Chicago economics professor John List.

In this new Congress, the gender chasm between both major parties is even more stark: Of the 20 women set to serve in the U.S. Senate come 2013, 16 are Democrats; of the 78 women in the House, 58 are Democrats. But Democratic women have indicated a desire to collaborate with their female colleagues across the aisle. Is cooperation possible with respect to the Paycheck Fairness Act, an amendment to the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 that was rejected by the Senate this past June?

The Story of Stuff Project has created a brief video imploring Americans to "choose family over frenzy" this holiday season, and "visit www.buynothingdosomething.org to take the pledge to stay home this Black Friday." The day when retailers generally go from "red" to "black" in terms of profit, Black Friday has been getting more harried every year. This year, many stores are even opening on Thanksgiving evening -- a bad deal for families trying to enjoy Thanksgiving together and retail workers alike.

The website Close the Wage Gap was created by individuals from Carnegie Mellon University as a submission to the Equal Pay App challenge on Challenge.gov, which is dedicated to fostering public-private partnerships that tackle critical issues. In this case, the critical issue being tackled is the gender wage gap, a problem that affects virtually every demographic of American women.

It's not just the mommy effect that lowers women's wages. A new report from the American Association of University Women finds that the gender wage gap starts affecting women as early as their first year out of college. The report, Graduating to a Pay Gap, found that women who are new to the workforce make on average 82 percent of what men who do the same work and had the same major make. The number overall for full-time women in the workforce is 77 cents to a man's dollar.

On Wednesday's Colbert Report, Stephen Colbert interviewed Liza Mundy, a longtime Washington Post reporter, a fellow at the New America Foundation, and the author of the new book "The Richer Sex: How the New Majority of Female Breadwinners is Transforming Sex, Love and Family." Though Colbert said he assumed the book was "pictures of Warren Buffett and Bill Gates going at it," the book is actually about, well, not that. Watch Colbert and Mundy's chat after the jump.

NPR has produced a fascinating chart showing how Americans from different economic strata -- poor, middle class, and rich -- spend their money. As you might guess, many of the results are extremely different between the classes. For instance, "poor families spend a much larger share of their budget on basic necessities such as food at home, utilities and health care." There are also surprising similarities, especially when it comes to housing as a proportion of income. Check out the chart after the jump.

The report from Prudential Financial found that a slight majority of women surveyed are now the primary breadwinners in their household. Reasons cited include the loss of job by a partner, women marrying later, and divorce. Despite this increase, just 20 percent of women surveyed said they "feel well prepared to make financial decisions," compared to 45 percent of men.

A new infographic from CareOne looks at the recent trends among women and children with regard to their debt burdens. "In 2011, the percentage of moms asking for help with their debt increased 32 percent over the prior year," the graphic states, citing data from a recent CareOne study. View the full infographic, with more statistics on women, chidren, and debt, after the jump.

Has anyone heard of the Credit CARD Act of 2009? It's a federal law, backed up by a number of regulations, that changed many things, most of them considered good by most people. But it changed at least one thing I consider to be not so good and that I only discovered recently when I applied for a department store credit card. Someone like me with zero income couldn't qualify regardless of credit score, but that if my wife were there she could apply and I could be on the account.

An initiative to establish a new federal law known as “For an unconditional basic income” was formally introduced in Switzerland in April. The idea, which consists quite simply of giving a monthly income to all citizens that is neither means-tested nor work-related, has generated commentary throughout the Swiss blogosphere. If the initiative to introduce a basic income gathers more than 100,000 signatures before October 11, 2013, the Federal Assembly is required to look into it and can call a referendum if the initiative is judged to be credible.