Gambling Addiction?

Here's a dangerous game you can play, gambling and seeing how the regular season for the NFL is right around the corner I thought I would touch on the subject. Here in Canada we have this great lottery product by the name of Pro-Line I have to admit I love the game.

Basically how it works is you have to make a minimum bet of anywhere between $2-$100 on a minimum of 3 games up to 6 games with your odds increasing with the more games selected. All the teams you selected to win must win and cover the spread you selected otherwise you lose. There are other variations of the game but this is the one that I most commonly play.

Now the reason I'm writing about this is not to show support for gambling it's more of an issue in our household that can and does often send out finances spinning out of control. For example with Pro-Line I started playing it years ago with one $2 wager just for fun. The problem came that me and my wife were always fighting over the t.v. on Sundays. Soon she was watching over my shoulder as I was placing my bets and decided she wanted to give it a try.

No problem maybe it will get her to pay more attention to Football on Sundays a win win. So we started placing two $2 bets while I won on watching my Football on Sundays, but found the bets escalating to several $5 tickets as she got more into it. Now you might be like several $5 tickets isn't bad while that may be the case, when you tie in her love for instant tickets, bingo, weekly lottery and the casino that amount quickly grows out of hand!

At one point in the past when things really got out of hand, I'm glad to report it's much more under control now but to give you an example of how fast you finances can spiral out of control and by no means are we the quote un-quote high rollers.

Pro-Line = $30 a week

Instant Tickets = $40 a week (ballpark as she never shows me all the tickets she purchases only if she wins do I see them usually)

Bingo = $90 a session 4 X a week =$360

Casino = $200 a week (I was playing roulette consistently in the casino if I won I would be in the casino night after night, until the dealer told me one day that I might be developing a problem. Here I thought that dealer was my lucky dealer so I would always go to his table, turns out he was because I started avoiding his table due to the comment and started losing consistently and I haven't been in the Casino since over 2 years. If your out there thank you)

For a grand total of $630 a week!!! Just short of my take home pay per week! We were spiraling out of control, sure we won some but not enough to cover the losses. I'm glad to report that this isn't the case anymore. Not that we don't gamble at all anymore but it's much more inline.

Pro-Line will keep it under $20 a week.

Lottery Tickets $2.50 per week as we only play in my group pool at work now.

Instant Tickets $15 per week (she still doesn't show them maybe she's hiding them better but I don't see nearly as many tickets around anymore)

Bingo $90 every two weeks (her paycheck and it is her form of entertainment I can deal with $90 every 2 weeks I couldn't deal with $360 every week it almost caused our separation!)

Casino as stated before thanks to the dealer I haven't been in a casino in over 2 years.

Grand total $82.50 per week still alot but a significant drop. We could probably make some more adjustments to this I would rather see it around the $50 mark.