Race the rudder. Raise the sails. Raise the sales.

Captain, an unidentified chip approaching. Over.

Roger that. Wait. Is that an enterprise sales solution?

Reach sales professionals, not professional sailors.

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This is Optimal Finance Daily. Your budget is like a leaking ship by Jacob Lundfisker of Early Retirement Extreme.com.

As far as I understand, wooden ships are never completely watertight.

Especially older ships, develop leaks, and water gets in between the cracks when the boat is

straining and working as it moves through the water.

This water ends up at the bottom of the ship, under the floorboards of the lower deck, or the only

deck, in a place called the bilge. To compensate for this and keep the ship from sinking,

or at least the deck from overflowing, bilge pumps must be run on a regular basis to pump this water out.

As long as the bilge pump is not overwhelmed, that is having to run all the time, the ship will not

sink. The average U.S. family, also known charmingly as a consumer unit, spends $49,638 each year.. and I, since we don't have 0.5 children, we are

slightly smaller than a unit, spend about a quarter of this amount. So I have never been able to

fully appreciate what made up the difference. If we subsided on a diet of ramen noodles and junk food, our clothes were falling

apart and our teeth were falling out, the difference would be obvious. However, if it weren't for the

RV, which costs more to live in here than it would cost to live in a house in many other places of the

country, the difference would be subtle indeed, and you would not be able to tell the

difference. To understand the average $49,638 budget, a ship makes an excellent example. There are

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