[Phil Patrick]

I’m struggling to come to terms with the damage I have done to my family finances. We’ve always struggled with money due to debts elsewhere but always had a budget plan and a time-frame for becoming debt free. I’ve never really had an issue with betting, I can go to Vegas and not spend a dollar on anything gambling related. My weakness is football gambling. I’ve won some big money on bets that seemed quite logical to me, but my problem was never taking my money and running, I’d always go for a little bit more. It’s a great feeling when you win but what really drove me was assigning the money to paying off debts – seeing a balance that would clear a credit card … then I’d think about getting some more to continue with and then end up losing it all. Trying for continuity always made me take one bet too many. We refinanced as a family back in September 2015 off of the back of being gifted £5k from grandparents. At this time, I had also been learning to trade forex online and was doing quite well at it. I had taken £1k to just over £3k from Sept 15 to Dec. However, knowing that I had this amount, I found myself carelessly betting silly amounts of money thinking that if the worst came to the worst I could offset the damage with my trading account. To cut a long story short I realised what I was doing with the betting in December and tried to put myself back to evens by increasing my trades in my trading and through the pressure of it all I lost the entire trading account. I’ve made a promise to myself never to get out of control again but that was as of New Year … it’s April now and I haven’t shared it with my fiancée. She has no idea where we stand with money, I really want to tell her but we’ve been arguing on and off for quite a while. I love her but the pressure of this secret is overwhelming for me and puts me in a defensive mood with everything she says. I’m desperate to share the bad news with her, she is my best friend but I constantly feel like I need more time to present the information to her. Looking back over the months of gambling I just can’t remember what I was thinking at the time. I only bet to clear debt because I can be successful at it. How on earth do I tell my fiancée? I fear she will leave me, but the longer I don’t say anything the worse this will be. We have an opportunity to move into a bigger house this summer which because of the money situation is looking impossible – I’ve yet to share that with her. I don’t even know what type of gambling problem I have. I don’t think about it every day an I don’t have an urge to place a bet when watching a football match. It’s just those six months of stupidity that has dug me a hole so deep I don’t know how to get out of it. I really feel like they’d be better off without me, I cause more harm than good. I don’t want to lose them.

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