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According to an American Express survey of 1,518 people, guests will spend an average of $539 per wedding this year — and that's just to attend the event, not to be a member of the wedding party. The wallet-busting figure is up $200 from 2012, when guests reported shelling out an average of $329 on clothes, hotel rooms, and gifts.

The real cost is probably even higher given the estimates for some of the costs. The credit card company says that guests will budget just $57 for new clothes, $27 for a babysitter or pet sitter, and $95 for a hotel room—all of which seems astoundingly low, even for a local event. Members of the bridal party can count on spending a little bit more, thanks to slightly higher clothing costs: about $577 per wedding, according to American Express.

Attending a wedding soon? Learn a few money-saving tips after the jump.

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What's in a name? Lots and lots of "Benjamins," ($100 dollar bills, that is). Unless your name happens to be Benjamin, in which case, some research suggests, you had better stick with Ben.

The Ladders, an online job-matching site, recently crunched the numbers in its database of over 6 million career professionals to determine the top names for corporate executives as well as the names of the highest earners. They found that people with first names longer than five letters lose out on about $3,600 in salary every year—and that's per letter. So, for little Alexander that means potentially missing out on more than $500,000 over the course of a 40-year career.

Want insight on how names affect other aspects of life? Read on.

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Jennifer Wayland, 15, who attends Parkway Central High in Chesterfield, MO, quietly existed in a lonely well of low self-esteem, shame about her body, and, as she puts it, the feeling that she "took up too much space." Then she found the courage to tell her mom, and so began the tough road back to regaining control of her health and self-confidence.

The ninth grader earned a prestigious award for the compelling essay she wrote on her struggle with body image and disordered eating. On May 1, Sharon Robinson, the daughter of baseball legend Jackie Robinson, presented Wayland with the grand prize in the Jackie Robinson Breaking Barriers essay contest, sponsored by Major League Baseball and Scholastic. The other grand prize winner was Luke Lunday, a fifth grader who has cerebral palsy and shared his determination to ride a bicycle on his own. The contest received more than 18,000 submissions.

Read on to learn more about Jennifer's heartfelt story.

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Real estate agents at a New York-based broker are showing their company pride — and getting an extra 15 percent in commission — by having their company's logo tattooed onto their bodies.

Thirty-seven men and women at Rapid Realty have gotten the green-and-black "Double R" tattoos so far, the company's CEO and founder, Anthony Lolli, told Inman News.

Related: Celebrity Tattoos Gone Wrong

"They wear it like a badge of honor," said Lolli, who is also a real estate agent in their South Park Slope office. "They get a lot of respect from the other agents with the amount of commitment that they have."

There are other benefits as well: "Talk about marketing — they're walking billboards!" he tweeted.

Learn more about this interesting story after the jump.

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Ever feel that your relationship suffers from a unique brand of frustration, tension, distance, or any number of other troubling feelings? The reality is, there is struggle in every romance. "If you are experiencing disillusionment, well, join the human race," relationship expert Helen LaKelly Hunt tells Yahoo! Shine. LaKelly Hunt and her husband, Harville Hendrix, PhD, are cocreators of Imago Relationship Therapy and have been helping couples for more than 30 years.

More on Yahoo: Is This the World's Most Epic Marriage Proposal?

Hendrix, author of the bestselling book Getting the Love You Want, started examining the question, "why do couples fight" in the late 1970s. After studying and working with thousands of couples, he and LaKelly Hunt have found that there are 10 common bad habits couples engage in that make relationships miserable and can lead to a breakup or divorce.

Avoid a ruined relationship by steering clear of these 10 bad habits.

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A routine part of mealtimes for many families may actually be harming your kids. A new study has found that urging your kids to join the "clean plate club" by finishing all the food on their plates can prevent them from learning healthy eating habits.

Related: Are Parents to Blame For Childhood Obesity?

"In the 1950s, cleaning your plate meant something different," Katie Loth, a registered dietician and research assistant at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis and was the lead author on the study, told HealthDay. "Portion sizes have gotten bigger over time, and if you encourage kids to rely on environmental indicators, like how much food is on their plates or the time of day, they'll lose the ability to rely on internal cues to know whether they're hungry or full."

Read on to learn more about the dangers of the clean-plate club.

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Scientists at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, have confirmed what kids have been insisting for ages: playing video games can be good for you. Specifically, playing block-building games like Tetris can do more to fix lazy eye than traditional treatments.

Lazy eye (medical name: amblyopia) is a condition in which vision doesn't develop properly in one eye. It can cause permanent sight problems if left untreated, since the brain eventually just stops processing the blurry images coming from the underfunctioning eye. According to The Eye Digest, about 3 percent of people in the United States have amblyopia.

Find out how doctors use video games to improve lazy eye after the jump.

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We love the crazy things kids come up with, and a kid's point of view on pop culture can't be beat. After taking a look at promo pictures for a few popular TV shows and movies, my 8-year-old offered to weigh in on what she thought they were really all about. (You may look at the picture of the Kardashian sisters and think "Oh, season premiere," but a second grader sees something totally different!) We decided to contrast her point of view with those from the 7-year-old son of The Stir's Linda Sharps. Here's what the kids had to say:

About Keeping Up With the Kardashians:

7-year-old boy: "This is a show about three girls who go out and while they're shopping a battle breaks out and they have to use their shopping carts as weapons! But their hair gets in the way. They should have ponytails, that would help. The good thing is they're wearing black like ninjas."

8-year-old girl: "This is about some girls that get into a lot of trouble. They do a lot of bad decisions. They look sort of mean. Are they singing the 'Single Ladies' song? And the ones on the ends both look like Selena Gomez if she was mean."

Hear what the "expert panel" has to say about Twilight, Teen Mom, and more after the break!

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Russian artist Sergey Balovin discovered that he could live without money by accident.

When he moved to China in 2010, "I didn't know almost anybody in Shanghai," he told Yahoo! Shine in an email. He speaks mostly Russian, a little English, and no Chinese at all, he explained, and was making good money selling expressionist landscape paintings. When a neighbor agreed to give him her easel in exchange for a hand-drawn portrait, he realized that other people might be willing to make similar trades.

"I gave the announcement on a Russian Shanghai forum," he said. "I said, 'I am ready to draw portraits and exchange them for things useful in my home.' A few weeks later, I had a few dozen of new friends and everything that is necessary for everyday life."

Learn more about Sergey's story after the jump.

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When she appears in public in a particular dress, retailers scramble to keep the frock in stock (and designers work overtime to create knockoffs). But the Kate Middleton effect goes far beyond the fashion world — so much so that the royal family's foundation has moved to stop others from capitalizing on her name recognition.

According to the Telegraph, St. James's Palace confirms that it has applied to the UK's Intellectual Property Office to trademark her name, along with Prince William's and Prince Harry's.

Related: The Kate Middleton Nose Job Is Now a Thing

Originally set up by Princes William and Harry in September 2009, the Royal Foundation of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge and Prince Harry received a record number of donations after Prince William and Kate Middleton announced their engagement. (The foundation's name was changed to include the duchess's title after the royal wedding in April 2011).

Find out more about the royal family's latest philanthropic efforts after the jump.

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When 5-year-old Ethan Clos showed up at school with a short, spiky mohawk last week, his fellow kindergarteners thought it was cool. But administrators at Reid Primary and Middle School in Springfield, Ohio, deemed the edgy cut too disruptive, and ordered him home until he adopted a tamer style.

His mom, Keshia Castle, said that school officials suspended her son on Wednesday. After he begged her for the hairstyle, she finally let him get it over spring break.

RELATED: Utah Teen Kicked Out of Class for Dyeing Her Hair… Auburn?

"They seen his hair like it was," she told WHIO-TV on Friday. "All the little kids were going over and feeling on it and everything."

Read on to learn how Ethan's new rocker style violated the school's dress and grooming policies.

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Country music superstar Carrie Underwood has discovered the secret to a happy marriage, and it's kind of retro: Look hot, have date nights, and let your her husband call the shots.

Sheryl Sandberg, avert your eyes: Underwood, a six-time Grammy Award winner, says she would totally "lean out" of her career if her husband, professional ice hockey player Mike Fisher, wanted her to.

RELATED: 12 Actors Who Say They've Quit Acting

"If Mike ever told me he needed me to quit, I'd quit," she tells People magazine this week. "When you make that promise to somebody, and you stand before God and your family and friends, you've got to do everything that you possibly can to make that work."

Read on to find out more.

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Coffee lovers and green tea enthusiasts, unite! A new study out of Japan shows that people who drink both beverages every day have a lower risk of stroke than those who drink just one or the other (or neither).

Researchers have been touting the antioxidant properties of green tea for years, and recent studies show that your daily coffee fix boosts more than just your energy levels. But putting the two drinks together — not in the same cup, of course — may help you reap the health benefits of both.

Researchers looked at the coffee and tea consumption habits of almost 82,369 Japanese adults over 13 years and found that people who had a cup of coffee every day were 20 percent less likely to have a stroke (compared to those who didn't drink coffee at all). But that's not to say that coffee is better for you than tea. In fact, the study noted that people who drank four or more cups of green tea a day were also about 20 percent less likely to have a stroke. Since the two drinks help prevent strokes in different ways, drinking both can lower your risk of stroke more than just drinking one or the other, the study authors explained.

Read on to learn more about the health benefits of both coffee and tea.

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Close on the heels of a national debate about women and work sparked by Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg and her new book, a new survey shows that more moms would prefer to work outside of the home full time.

A new Pew Research survey found changing preferences among working moms. While 20 percent of moms with kids under age 18 said that they'd that rather work full time in 2007, that number jumped to 32 percent last year.

The shift may have more to do with economic conditions than professional ambitions, the Associated Press reported.

"Women aren't necessarily evolving toward some belief or comfort level with work," study co-author Kim Parker, an associate director at the Pew Research center, told the Associated Press. "They are also reacting to outside forces and in this case, it is the economy."

Read on to learn a few reasons why the percentage of full-time working mothers has increased.

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Bea Johnson, environmental lifestyle blogger and author of Zero Waste Home, says her family of four's household garbage output plateaued about three years ago and has stayed the same ever since: one quart per year. That's not a typo. During a phone interview, I ask her what's in her "waste jar" for 2013, and she paused briefly as she rummaged through the few debris. "A laminated fishing license, a few bits of plastic from an electrical repair, a piece of cable from my son's bike, and a lollipop stick — probably someone gave it to my son and he couldn't refuse; I understand." That's three months of garbage. It would include butter wrappers, too, the one food item Johnson buys in packaging, since she found it was too expensive and impractical to make, but she's saving them for an art project.

The average American produces over 1,000 pounds of garbage a year, and 10 years ago, Johnson; her husband, Scott; and their two young sons were blithely dragging their overflowing 64-gallon trash cans to the curb in front of their sprawling suburban home just like everyone else. "As life rolled by effortlessly and afforded my Barbie-like platinum-blonde hair, artificial tan, injected lips, and Botoxed forehead," she writes, "we seemed to have it all."

Read on to learn how this eco-friendly family is leading by example.

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Worried about their 13-year-old daughter's increasingly disrespectful behavior, Gentry and Renee Nickell of Crestview, FL, decided to make her punishment humiliating and public. On Saturday, the teen (whose name has not been released) spent 90 minutes standing at a busy intersection with a handwritten sign describing her sins.

It read: "I’m a self-entitled teenager w/no respect for authority. I’m also super smart, yet I have 3 'Ds' because I DON’T CARE."

Passing motorists saw the teen, who was standing with her dad at the corner of Ferdon Boulevard and US Highway 90 in Crestview and snapped pictures of her with their cell phones. Some of the photos ended up on Facebook, where they were shared within the Crestview community (the Nickells said that they have not seen those photos; Yahoo! Shine was not able to find them online). Someone called the police, who showed up to talk to the teen and left after deciding that she was "aware of her punishment and she was not in any harm," Crestview police records show.

Related: Is Parental Shame the New Spanking?

Now, however, the parents are feeling a little public humiliation of their own.

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Callie Mitchell was a 25-year-old photography student with plans "to wander the world to capture the minuscule moments of my surroundings" when something happened that changed her life forever.

She got pregnant.

Related: Wisconsin Bill Claims Single Moms Cause Child Abuse by Not Being Married

In an essay for college newspaper The Daily Iowan, where she works as a photographer, Mitchell described her experiences as "a spontaneous moment leading to an unplanned life change. Not a mistake. Definitely a surprise." Her photo-essay and videos have had a powerful impact around the world. (You can see her entire slideshow here.)

According to the essay, she found out she was pregnant on March 25, 2012. She and her boyfriend decided to have the child and begin a new chapter in their life together.

Read on to learn how Callie felt via her intimate journal entries.

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While many college students across the United States are looking at the calendar and getting ready for a booze-fueled spring break, some students are planning a different kind of vacation bash: their weddings.

Also on Shine: Is 21 Too Young To Get Married?

It's not uncommon for teens attending small religious schools to forgo the typical drinking-and-partying college experience and instead focus on finding their soul mates. At Walla Walla University in Washington state, the idea of "dating to marry" is so much the norm that students have dubbed the school "Western Wedding University."

Is this a match made in heaven? Read on to find out.

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Greg and Sharon Kitchen had company coming over, so when their youngest son, Danny, asked for their iTunes password so he could download a cool new game, they tapped it in for him and left him alone to play while they entertained their guests in their South Gloucestershire, England, home.

Related: My Kid's First iPad?

"Danny was pestering us to let him have a go on the iPad. He kept saying it was a free game so my husband put in the passcode and handed it to him," his mom told the Telegraph. "It worried me when he asked for the password but I had a look at the game it said it was free so I didn't think there would be a problem."

Related: The Best Apps for Kids

On Monday morning, the mother of five woke up to 19 emails from iTunes, listing purchases adding up to 1,710 British pounds — about $2,500 — from the night before. By the time her credit card company called her to check up on the charges, Kitchen had figured out what had happened.

Find out how Greg and Sharon handled this delicate situation after the jump.

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Yes, that's a cat on a toilet. And yes, he does look pretty pissed about it. The whole Internet has just discovered the Litter Kwitter, a potty training system for cats that was—up until this point—known only to a rare breed of ambitious cat owners.

Created by a woman who toilet-trained her own cat, the Litter Kwitter works like this: You put a color-coded litter-filled ring with a very small hole on your toilet bowl. As your cat learns to jump on the porcelain throne every time he needs to relieve himself, you switch to a ring with a larger hole. This goes on until your animal suddenly realizes he's standing on a toilet bowl, praying he doesn't fall in.

Related: 10 Least-Trendy Cat Names of 2013

It's great idea, but according to the people who write reviews on Amazon about cat toilet training, it's not that easy.

Please take a moment to enjoy some of the comments posted about the Litter Kwitter, because they are brilliant: