When I was 10 I spent my summer in Rhode Island. While goofing around in the Salt Pond, I found an abandoned wooden rowboat. It was leaky, but the leak was somewhat slow. If I bailed the boat out completely, it would take about 25 to 30 minutes before it would be inundated with water again. My friend, Chad and I would float down the channel and under the bridge in it. The water was only about 4 feet deep, so we were never in any real danger. It wasn’t as though we were out in the middle of the Atlantic, and it was always a lot of fun to see the reactions of the people walking over the bridge when they saw us ‘sinking’. Nobody ever tried to save us, but they did get a good laugh out of it. We eventually got sophisticated, and with my older brother’s help we put a coat of fiberglass on the bottom of that liltte wooden rowboat and stopped the leak. We then added a 3.5HP gas outboard motor, and we were able to travel to parts of the pond that were once too far to be accessible. That effort changed the game and greatly expanded our horizon.
Now that I’m older, I have new leaks to manage. I have children to raise, bills to pay, and a house to maintain, and I’d prefer to think of my current situation as a leaky roof instead of a leaky boat. A leaky boat when you have others depending on you for their survival isn’t nearly any fun. A leaky roof is more of an annoyance, in that it is a seemingly constant barrage of creditors and banks, bill collectors and bills. I opted into this game when I left my old job looking for new, entreprenurial opportunities, so I accept this situation, yet it can be frustrating nonetheless if I let it. It just takes time to fix all the little leaks. But just as we coated the underside of the rowboat with fiberglass, I’ll fix all the leaks in the roof and put a stop to the annoyances. Right now, it just requires a lot of pots and pans to catch the water until I can finish patching. I thank Dave Ramsey for writing the ‘Total Money Makeover’ book, and providing instructions on how to fix the leaks. I’d encourage anyone who reads this post and needs some financial guidance to check it out.