I’m Beau Humphreys and I’m a personal
finance coach. Normally I blog about personal finance at investwisely.ca or have a podcast called The Personal Finance Show and that’s obviously about
personal finance too. But today I’m going to tell a little bit of my story which
is about addiction and mental health because I think it’s really important to
talk about this stuff. People don’t talk about it enough and it kind of made
me into the person that I am today which feels like a completely different
person to be honest so I’m going to tell you a little story. There are probably
four major incidents in my gambling addiction period so I’m going to talk
about the worst one today which is when I was 25
I had a pretty bad relapse so I was working at a job I didn’t really like so
much well it was okay but I wasn’t really enjoying it I wasn’t I didn’t see
a lot of future there I knew I needed to make a change so you know what I thought
was I’m gonna take a little trip to my 25th birthday I found this thing called
the repositioning cruise and this was a like a one-night like two-day cruise for
like $100 on my birthday I’m gonna cruise underneath the Golden Gate Bridge
and it’s gonna be awesome and it was awesome person under the Golden Gate
Bridge but what I didn’t realize was this is probably the worst idea for me
at the time because it turns out as I found out later I have attention deficit
disorder and a DD it made me afraid of everything and
one of the things that I was afraid of mostly was new things and being in
uncomfortable situations because I didn’t know how to deal with them
there’s really something about focus and being able to handle new things and be
able to really pay attention to them that was really a struggle for me so
going on a trip at this time was not a good idea especially since I had been
kind of okay with the gambling for a little bit so I get on this cruise and
turns out this a casino on board and I’m all by myself and I’m not feeling I’m
feeling lonely and uncomfortable and so I turned to the thing that made me
comfortable and so I went and visited a casino and just one thing led to another
and I spent a little bit of money so but at this point I now like I have the bug
again and I cruise under the Golden Gate Bridge but I feel sort of guilty about
my family the casino like do I have to tell
people I spend money that I don’t have it’s always money that I don’t have at
this point what I did was the whole rest of my San Francisco trip I was either
thinking about gambling or actually looking for a casino I actually spent
two hours walking around San Francisco trying to find a casino I don’t know I
don’t think I don’t think at this point I had internet or a way to figure it out
so I was like maybe there’s one yeah it was pretty bad all I could think about
was getting home and getting home and gambling and I didn’t know how I just
knew I needed to get home and Gamble so I get home on the plane and the first
thing that I do is just go buy a bunch of lottery tickets and I wasn’t really
one to buy about a lot of ticks when I was younger but that wasn’t really like
gambling to me so if I just buy like I don’t know a couple hundred dollars of
lottery tickets and it just starts to get worse and worse from there
you know over a couple of weeks maybe two three four weeks from when I get
back I’m just not trying to I’m just like
we really started taking extreme a gambling approach like maybe thinking
that I’m just going all out or I’m not feeling good I’m not I can’t really tell
you exactly what caused it I mean maybe at this extreme fear of just not being
able to be comfortable somewhere other than where I am where I currently was
and my job and and when I didn’t want to go back to the job and I was just
miserable and there the way to cope was doing this gambling thing that I always
did to cope with life and funny enough I I had applied to a job a couple of
months before and I figured it was long gone but I heard back from the job and
it was a job at may believe sports entertainment place I end up working for
six years after that and the live entertainment department and
there’s a strike and so they weren’t really there was a hiring freeze so they
kind of were delayed in hiring so they came to me a couple months later and so
I went and I I started the interview process and that the interview process
made everything worse because this is like super high stress and I can I
couldn’t handle it I just you know at this point in my life
I just couldn’t handle it without gambling heavily and since I was already
into the gambling and just made it worse maybe if I hadn’t started on the Cruz
casino it wouldn’t be so bad but I started and so now I’m just like let’s
do blowing through all the money that I have maxing out the credit cards no
money in the bank and I’ve gone through these three
interviews for this job and I have to prepare all these presentations and I go
through these interviews and it’s going well
and during the day I’m at my current job at work and I’m I’m everything is going
well during the day and then I get home at night and I just basically gamble as
much as I can in order to cope but I don’t even think I was washing dishes at
this point probably not even cooking food because I have a takeout I would
just go to McDonald’s just anything that was easy anything that wasn’t effort
because I only had enough energy to put in say dad I knew that I needed to get
this job because the alternative was not good for me this kind of gave me an
option for the future maybe even a way out of the situation that I was in where
I might have more money that I could used to pay down debts so enduring this
this really kind of the worst relapse I’ve ever had one night I just I hit the
jackpot and it was twenty thousand dollars and that would have been enough
to cover everything that I just spent since I came back from San Francisco and
also some of my existing debt gambling debt and so the first thing I was like
this is great that was the first feeling that I had was this is great
you know finally I can start to get out of this and immediately after that
feeling I had a feeling that I wasn’t ever going to get to keep this money and
that I wouldn’t even be able to hold on to it for another day that
this this jackpot would just make me want to gamble more
and the thing about finding this out about yourself is a
really kind of a dreadful thing to know that you even if you win enough money to
pay back what you lost it’s never going to stick and it actually didn’t even
stick for another day and at the same time that I realize that I was going to
hold onto it I realized that I was never going to be able to get out of my
gambling by gamma there is no there’s no solution to
gambling that involves gambling because gambling would just lead to more
gambling and that always leads to more losses the only way to get out of the
gambling would be to stop and really try to figure out what was wrong
with me and it was causing me to do this so it was kind of a good thing but I
didn’t know it at the time it was really just probably the worst time of my life
because no I all my credit cards are maxed out and I probably had about seven
you know maybe five to seven at that time credit cards because I was just
whatever way I could get gambling funds and I had no money in my bank account so
I couldn’t even pay my rent so I had to reach out to a good friend of mine and
he he thought I stopped gambling a long time ago it was a very private thing for
me and so he was furious that that I was gambling again
but he did agree to lend me the money for rent and I told them that he could
you know have full access to my bank accounts my credit cards to have a look
at them whenever he wanted over the next a little bit and you know that that’s
always been a bit of a temporary measure you know holding on someone’s credit
cards or having someone look at your stuff it’s only temporary the real fix
for me was when I figured out what was wrong with me
ain’t got that treated and then then not instantly but the gambling the
need to do something extreme like gambling to cope and that went away but
you know the end of this story is I’m probably about $40,000 in debt and I’m
starting a new job which is I think it maybe it was paying me 40,000 a year so
it’s not ideal but it’s better than the situation I was in before but not really
because I’m probably another 15 or 20 thousand dollars in debt than when I was
before you know overall the story is a happy ending
but it didn’t happen right away and I really want to tell people about this
because you know addiction is hard mental health is also hard and the only
way that I was able to get through this it was by taking the time that I needed
to explore what was wrong with me and then taking the time to treat it and I
was only able to find out about the ADB after I went through a whole bunch of
different therapy options to figure it out
and even then it was an incident I you know I started taking the medication and
it did change my life but I still had these residual gambling behaviors I know
I want people to know that this is out there and then if you’re going through
something something like this not exactly like this but you know maybe you
just had a spending problem there’s there’s a way out you can get out of it
you know it might not be right away but as long as you know that there is a way
out then you can take the steps but usually there’s no way out of something
by doing the same thing that you were doing right they say that insanity is
doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result and I
was I just kept gambling thinking that somehow it was gonna fix itself or this
time was the time and now I had to change my life completely to get out of
this you know go work in a cigarette factory if you’re trying to quit smoking
you know I’m a big Cheers fan but I think Sam alone gave a really bad
example by working in a bar being an alcoholic you you don’t really do that
if you’re trying to change yourself because you’re always sucking there I
got a job you know about 10-15 years ago at a
casino in mice in my town I I’m a train roulette dealer I’m a croupier because I
thought it would be a good idea a good idea to not be able to gamble in the
casino that I worked in which is true but I’ve just exposing myself to this
world that I really really needed to get out of and so I’ll tell my other story
is another time but I think this is a good one to start with because you know
the your lowest point is there’s only you know they say you can only go up
from there and it’s you know I can I can talk about it now it’s so hard to talk
about it I can talk about it now but it was it was really terrible and I never
thought about suicide and funny enough I never thought about even going to get a
payday loan which is what a lot of people would have done instead of going
to their friend I think part of me wanted some accountability some help and
sometimes the only way I could get help was by causing some kind of disaster for
myself so that’s my story for today anyway and
it’s not the most uplifting one but it’s very important for people to know and
I’m here at the at fincon is a personal finance conference because today I help
people and I help them by just trying to give them some basic advice about what
to do with their money but I also want to help people by telling my story and
if you have a story you should tell it too because you never know who’s going
to be listening and then they say I have that too and then they go get medicated
or you know I have something similar and then they talk to you about it and maybe
they never even thought about it before but it’s something that they can work on
and fix but they never thought that they could or no one ever showed them for the
acceptance and this is important so thanks for
listening and I’ll see you next time