Hi,guys here is a client(KEN) his wife bought Nega from us and this is his story, he wanted to share, and he is more than welcome to do so.
Hello everybody, my name is KEN and i am 44 years old.
I live in Venice beach with my wife Meg who is 36 years old and my two teenage daughters Kim and Liv who are 14 and 16 years old.
So i work in my own small business i am an expert on plumbing and all new technologies that are available for today’s plumbing for both larger and smaller projects.
My story is that my father came from money, but he gambled on everything and ended up drinking himself to death in a small apartment in Santa Monica that my uncle paid for in his last 15 years.
He was 61 years old and this is more than 20 year ago.
So i saw as a child all the horrible situations my family was put in, me and my mother and sister due to my father always gambling away all of our money.
My parents divorced when i was in high school and i did not see my father very much after he moved out from our home in Hancock park.
I meet him a few times a year at the race track in LA and also a few times when we played cards together in some strange card place.
But his life was gambling 24/7 and he bet on the horses,sportsbetting and he played poker and even the slot machines.
I never thought that i would walk a mile in his shoes, but that is exactly what happen to me and my family.
I was not really betting or gambling until around 2005, i started to get a lot of work in the Las Vegas housing boom in 2003 and in 2005 i was one night taken by a client to a casino and i manage to turn 500 dollars into 8250 dollars, i remember that devilish sum so well, since it is this win that started my journey towards what the Nega program calls gambling hell.
So then it became second nature for me to visit the casinos after i was done working.
Usually i arrived on Wednesdays in Vegas and i did not leave until Sunday afternoon.
I could have driven home on Friday afternoon but because i wanted to to stay and gamble so i did not even care to go home over the weekend to my family, just so i could gamble instead 18 h a day.
Like for everyone else it usually starts with a win that triggers your brain to thinking that HEY i won last time , maybe i can do it again, and then the ugly cycle has started like it usually does for most people.
So i started to drop 10.000 here and 12.000 there, and it took around 10 years from 2005 to 2015 until i had emptied all of my families savings including my daughters college funds.
My wife found out and she was very upset which she had every right to be, i had betrayed my own loving family, by emptying out our savings.
So a long story short, we went to couples counseling and i promised not to gamble ever again.
So then 2016-2017 went well and we started saving again, a bit here and a bit there, and i felt that hey i have no gambling problem what so ever.
In January 2018 i am in Vegas again and i am meeting a client who likes to party so we visit a casino, which i have stayed away from by living in Motels not on the strip for the past 2 years time, when i work in Vegas.
I get drunk that night and i start to bet again that evening and now i am hitting my all time low for the next 22 months time.
Between 2005 and 2015 i have lost 700.0000 dollars, but between 2018 and late 2019 i lose another 924.000 dollars on sportsbetting and slot machines in Vegas.
So i have emptied my 401K to get access after penalties to 968.0000 dollars and 924.000 dollars is the sum that i lost in 22 months time.
The last two weekends in Nov 2019 i lost 232.000 dollars in two weeks time and that was it.I remember i had two 50.000 dollar paralys on NHL and NFL with two games in on both out of three and then i missed the third game on both parlays.
In Nhl i had two teams over 2.5 goals in, and then the third team Minnesota scored two goal in the first period and then they lost the game 2-4, so they had 40 min and 7! powerplays and still they did not score one mire that i really needed.
In the NFL parlay i missed by 2 points when my team misses a very easy field goal attempt in the last quarter.
Because i was so behind financially that i did not even bet on single games i did parlays instead to try and win more.
So that Sunday morning waking up in Vegas , then and there i had hit rock bottom, i had lost all of my money and my families money in the process, and i had let everybody down, including myself.
When i drove home from Vegas to LA there where many dark thought during that car ride.
So my wife found out that i had cashed in my 401K and she lost it, and she went online and found the NEGA gambling treatment program , and i was skeptical at first that why should i as a grown man need to hand over all financial decision and access to funds to my wife.
But she made it it crystal clear there and then, either i accept help or she would divorce me, the choice for me was easy i love my wife and my family i can not lose them.
Now almost 6 months later i feel a relief that i have no access to money or funds and i really do not even think about betting or gambling at all right now, i have also cancelled all sport channels and i do not even follow sports anymore, if there is some sports on tv i change the channel.
DAMAGE!, So i have created mayhem for my family, and my kids will not be able to attend college until they are 23 instead of 19 as we had planned.
So my kids will work for 4-5 years time full time and pick up as many extra shifts as possible and we will save as a family towards college for 5 years time.
Then i am hoping that at the age of 50 i can start to fill up my 401K again.
But i will be working to 70-75 years at least, because of my gambling addiction.
I am lucky to have a loving family that supports me and that my wife has not left me!.
But my advice to you, young people out there is this, do not play with fire like gambling truly is in every sense of the word.
Take it from me and from many other before me/you that you can not build large casinos or offer sports book if the house does not always win in the end.
The player/gambler will gamble so much that the house always win over time.
So do yourself and your loved ones a huge favor, do not ever start to gamble and if you have already started then please stop!, immediately, before you do to much damage to your life and to your finances.
Take care,
KEN.
Mrlifeadvise response: so this story is very typical it starts with a win and then the brain gets hijacked, and after awhile it has a life of its own, when the gambler is chasing his or her losses until-it all comes crashing down financially and emotionally.
