Hi,guys a client who bought NEGA our gambling treatment program wanted to reach out to us and tell his story so it might help somebody-else who is thinking of giving up on gambling and getting healthier lifestyle in the process.
So here is his story.
Hello everybody my name is Tom and i was born in Huntington beach Los Angeles in 1980.
I had a really good childhood with two loving parents and a 2 year older sister in Jen.
In 1995 my parent divorced and it was a mutual decision between my parents and they handled it well.
My sister wanted to stay with my father in LA since she was gonna attend UCLA .
My mother who is a chef got a job out in Las Vegas at one of the big casinos and i moved with here out there in 1996.
Vegas was much smaller than it is today, but we both liked it and i got along well in my new high school and my mother liked her new job.
I spent a lot of time in the casino where my mother worked, but of course i was not aloud to gamble since i was under aged at the time.
Press forward a few years and in 2001 i turn 21 and this is the first time i try and gamble a bit.
I play with the sports book and NFL and NHL mainly, but i also play the slots machines, the card games really never spoke to me.
Not a lot happens for me when it comes to gambling between me turning 21 and me turning 30, i play every week some slots and some sportsbook but it is for under 2000 dollars a week and it is pretty much break even during these 9 years time.
But my life has also changed a lot during this time period, where i have gone from a young man to a business owner.
I have started my own plumbing business at the age of 24 after going as an apprentice for several years with an older gentlemen that i really liked called Sal, he is sadly no longer with us, but he thought me the ins and outs of the plumbing world and i did and still do both commercial and private contracts for plumbing work.
The amount of houses being built in Las Vegas in the years of 2000-2008 was extreme, and i had in 2006 , five employees in my plumbing business.
By the time of the financial crisis in 2009 that changed everything in Vegas i had accumulated two 5 bedroom houses one that i lived in and one that i rented out.
They where value to 2 million dollars in 2008 and in 2010 they where valued to 1.4 million dollars.
And i had some other assets also like stocks and bonds.
All of this had come from my some what successful plumbing business.
When the subprime mortgage crisis hit in late 2007-2008 we started to lose all of our jobs, then we had several larger builders that went out of business and we had big invoices that where outstanding towards us, that we where never able to collect anything on.
So in a period of around 6 months everything changed, i closed my LLC and had to let all my employees go and then i started a new LLC and worked alone with more basic plumbing stuff in the Vegas and Henderson area.
I had no private debt and i had my houses and some other assets.
I But i had much more free time on my hands in 2010 so i started to hang more and more at the casinos both with the slots and in the sport book section, and BOY was this a mistake to say the least.
Looking back slowly i was getting sucked into the world of day time gambling and i started slowly to increase my gambling limits.
I had always had always kept my limit the same and it was 1000 dollars a week as a maximum loss that was acceptable for me at the time.
So in 5 years from 2010 to 2015 i manged to lose 723.000 dollars during that time frame.
So i had to sell my rental property to pay of my debts, half of this sum was on sports book and half was on the slot machines.
So here in 2015 i know that i need to quit and quit quickly, with my gambling.
But i am already so addicted that i am simply not able to quit on my own, i try different things but nothing works.
Fast forward another 5 years and i we are in early 2020 and i have now lost my house that i lived in and all my saving stocks/bonds and other savings.
But not only that, i have also taken on a 200.000 dollars 12%interest a years loan
And my family knows nothing about by gambling losses.
In Feb 2020 i have just lost 19.000 dollars in slots during an all nighter at the casino and i am so tired and feed up and i just want to go home and sleep,but i have a full days of work in front of me.
on my lunch break i see an add at Facebook for a gambling treatment program called NEGA (never ever gamble again), which i think is quite funny.
I say to myself what to i have to lose, the program was around 50 dollars and i am actually thinking at that moment do i want to spend 50 dollars today, remember i just blow 19.000 dollars in one night and now i am sitting and contemplating do i want to spend this 50 dollars online today, talk about an addicted brain.
But i buy the program and i download the file and then i dont read it for two days, come Saturday and i have no money for gambling so i start to read the manual the treatment program Nega and first i am scared when i read that i need to hand over my finances completely to a family member or a good friend and also that i need to tell everybody that i am an compulsive gambler so they can help me get clean and healthy.
So i sit and think about this during the whole weekend and on Monday evening i call my Sister in Malibu and i tell here everything that i have lost almost 2 million dollars gambling in the past 10 years.
To my surprise she kind of already had a sense that i was gambling way beyond my means for many years, but she did not want to get involved.
I love my sister very much but we only see each other twice a year, but we have always had a good adult relationship.
So she calls my father and mother, and we have a sit down in Los Angeles the upcoming Saturday, my mother has moved back to LA in 2009, which probably also made me gamble much more since i felt more lonely compared to when my mother was also living in Vegas even if we had not been living together for 9 years when she had moved.
So when i drove out to LA i felt a bit nervous but i had sent my family the pdf-file on Nega and they had all read it very carefully and we decided to give it a go, this was in March, then came the COVID-19 so, i decided to move back to LA and i moved in with my mother.
So the way this works now is that my mother handles all my finances true a power of attorney.
So i when i get paid, she handles all my bills including rent to her, when i now live with her full-time.
I was also lucky enough to have a family that could pay of my 12% a year interest loan of 200.000 dollars, and i will be paying them back over a period of 3 years time.
So i will be 43 years old when i have paid of my debts and at that time i do not have any assets to my name besides by work-truck.
So who has my life changed since i started with Nega?, simply put i have no access to money, so i can not play even if i wanted to, i have 10 dollars each day in my pocket for lunch and a coffee and that is all the money i will have access to during at least a 5 year period.
I do not miss the gambling one bit actually, i feel free when i can not gamble, and i dont have to think about weekly losses any-longer.
Me and my mother have also adopted from the shelter a brown pitbull girl called Lea, and i take here to the beach every day in the evening for 2 hours and i just enjoy spending time with here, if i was not getting clean i would have been stuck in Vegas trying to find funds to go and gamble again and lose again and the cycle would have kept on going.
I am grateful that i am lucky enough to have a strong family that is involved in my treatment and that i will be debt free in 3 years time.
I know several people in Vegas that will never be so lucky they will be in debt for the rest of their lives.
The thing i now really like about Nega is that it forces you to come clean to your family and friends and now they are watching your behaviour up close and this in combination not having access to any money/funds for gambling makes the treatment process easier for all parties.
I also do attend as recommended GA (gamblers anonymous) once week to remind me that i will have to live with this disease for the rest of my life.
And i have also come to terms that maybe i should never have access to more than 1000 dollars in my life, and let others safeguard my future assets.
You have to do the work yourself, but the program tells you how you have to do the work.
So i am truly grateful for the second chance that i have been given for a gambling free life.
I have also accepted that dating will be though when i have to live with my mother for 3 years time to get debt free, but i enjoy all the simple things in life, like walking and playing at the beach with my dog LEA and having a good home cooked meal.
I was not happy gambling and i doubt that many people are who are compulsive gamblers.
So join me in a gambling free life, but buying the Nega PROGRAM on this site.
Take care everybody.
Best wishes.
Tom from Huntington beach.
Mrlifeadvise final words.
We are truly happy for Tom that he has been able to use our treatment program to take the fight with gambling addiction.
The sad truth is that compulsive gamblers brains are altered for over and you can not alter them back to the stage the brain was in prior to the gambler becoming an compulsive gambler.
So this is something people needs to learn to live with for the rest of their lives.
The most important thing is to work on yourself every day and make sure that you do not slip up, and start gambling again.
Nothing good can ever come out of gambling.
Thank you for reading.
Mrlifeadvise.
