Confessed My Gambling Addiction To My Husband

Brought to you by the EveryDollar app. Start budgeting for free today. I am a recovering gambling addict. About 44 days clean. Good for you. Thank you. I came clean to my husband about a month ago about the problem and about the credit card debt that I've racked up. Mm-hmm. Um, he doesn't believe in credit cards. I told him about the snowball method, but he wasn't on board. So he went and got a loan and we paid him all off and had a plastic to me. Mm-hmm. Um, but now how do I like regain his trust? Um, I mean, if anything's come good out of it, we now combine our accounts after 25 years. So he can keep an eye on me. We had separate accounts for 25 years and now they're combined just so he can keep an eye on me. But how do I, uh, regain his trust? So congratulations. 44 days sober. Good for you. I just met a gentleman in the lobby a little bit earlier who showed me his 11-year coin. Nice. 11 years sober. Different situation, but still a coin. Are you doing GA? I am not right now. I have some pre-sessions through my insurance at work with a counselor, and I'm going to see her every week. The closest GA meeting to me is I'm pretty far away, and it's at night, and I can't drive at night, so it makes it difficult. But I am seeing a counselor. Okay. Because if you have an admitted addiction, you need to have someone walk with you. If it's a counselor, that's fine. If it's GA, that's fine. But it requires other human relationships alongside you to bust your chops. Right. It's the only way you stay clean. Well, that, and there's like no way I'd be able to gamble right now because now he sees everything that does that, that just, that just, that just, um, bottles it up. It doesn't heal it. I know. I know. Okay. So I want you to get, I want you to dig it all out and he begin the healing process and put the practical things in place, which you've done. So everything you're telling me is very good. Even the tone of your voice is very good in this. So you're, you're heading in the right way. The way you build trust with anyone, rebuild trust with anyone is time. Yeah. You've been clean 44 days. When you've been clean 44 months, he should be treating you differently. Yeah. Okay. Uh, if he, you know, and, um, so anytime you do anything that is, that breaks trust or breaks, um, relationship, uh, the only thing is a pattern of cleanliness. Uh, over time and the longer the clean, longer you're clean and the longer you guys are interacting and communicating and talking about money and you're sharing what you're learning in counseling and he's learning, you know, how to be a husband to, uh, someone who has struggled with this kind of thing. Then, you know, the longer that goes on, this could be a beautiful, beautiful love story. It could be a beautiful wealth building story. Did you know your personal info is getting bought and sold to people right now who use AI to target you with bizarrely personal scams and spam? Like, hey, George, are you interested in selling your house at 253 Sprague Street? Well, lucky for you, there's Delete Me. Delete Me, as the name implies, goes to hundreds of creepy data broker sites and deletes your personal info. Over and over all year long. I use and love Delete.me because I can't stop scammers from using AI. But I can make myself much more difficult to target. So go to joindeleteme.com slash Ramsey and get 20% off an annual plan or click the link in the description. That's join, J-O-I-N, deleteme.com slash Ramsey. To expect him to just suddenly go, oh, I think you're okay. 44 days later, nah, I wouldn't. Right. And you wouldn't either. That's not common sense. Right. But the pattern is there. So I'm going to recommend a book called Trust, oddly enough, by Dr. Henry Cloud. Okay. He's one of our favorite guys that comes on the air here with us. And he wrote a book called Boundaries that made him famous. He's one of my best friends. And he's just brilliant on this kind of stuff. And the whole book talks about how to gain trust, how to regain trust after it's been broken. But it outlines this idea of a predictable pattern that's there. And, um... But yeah, you said that the good thing that came out of it is now we work together on money. And so as you are giving input on money, I don't want him just babysitting you or sitting on you like you're not an egg to be hatched. Okay. But I do want you working together with full transparency, which gives him comfort as he is regaining trust. And that's fair to him. Right. So that's all good. So I'll give you one more example because I've been babbling. George, before I do that, what are you thinking? Well, the big thing, and I've heard Dr. John Deloney talk about this, is he gets to set the pace for forgiveness. And so you need to ask him, hey, what does that look like? Is that we're going to do a weekly budget meeting for this long, and after six months, here's what might be unlocked. You're going to go to Gambler's Anonymous every week. You're going to follow our debt payoff plan. And if all things go to plan and he sees... How much you're sacrificing and how much your intentionality is, I think that will naturally cause the forgiveness to happen, maybe even at a faster pace. Yeah. So in other words, out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks. So when he speaks about this two years from now, he would say something, if he was talking to someone that you wanted him to tell, okay, but he would say something like, hey, Katie had a gambling problem and we teamed up and paid off the debt in 18 months. Right. Not, Katie had a gambling problem and I had to pay it off. Right. You see, that because you were emotionally involved in the budget process, the sacrifice process to clean up a mess because he can't stand debt. And so he's got the willies about that as much as he does about the gambling. Right. Definitely. Yeah. And so, and you just say that out loud to him. I know that I hit you twice. I hit you once with the gambling and twice with the debt. And so let's work on this together. I'm willing to do whatever we got to do to make sure that I, A, I don't go back, but B, we get this cleaned up as fast as possible so we can put this in the rear view mirror and have a wonderful life going forward, okay? Yeah, thanks, Dave. Yeah, lesser story, not as important as yours, but when I went broke at 28 years old and lost everything, My wife had two little babies, and her saying was, if I asked her, I was buying and selling houses, said, hey, I'm looking at a house over here in this area, and she would say, whatever you want to do, honey. And I did whatever I wanted to do. And I went and made a mess, and I went broke, and we lost everything, and the lights got cut off at the house, and the water got cut off at the house, and there's two babies in there, and we're in foreclosure and bankruptcy. Okay. Can you imagine that this woman was terrified and did not trust me? She shouldn't. I was an idiot. Okay. You don't trust an idiot. That's a bad idea. And so whatever you want to do, honey, had to be removed from her vocabulary for the rest of her life. And then when we finally started understanding the stuff we teach here, we said, okay, we're going to have an emergency fund I discovered that as we put that emergency fund in place, and I looked up and there was $10,000 laying there, that it unlocked forgiveness in her because she felt secure again. Right. And to the point that to this day, now almost 40 years later, if I'm talking about doing And she goes, Okay, I don't mind the thing we're talking about, but that look in your eye, I don't like that scheming and scamming look. I don't like you chasing a deal. Let's slow down a little bit and look at that. And that's her way of saying, you've regained trust, but occasionally you remind me of that old version of you, and it scares the hell out of me. You follow me? Uh-huh. But we're largely healed, like 99%, but occasionally she'll go, no. That one feels weird, and I don't want to go there again. And it activates that old scar way back there. So you never quite get 100% over it, but you can get 99.9% over it. That's the moral of that story. Time plus consistency. That's it. You should have just answered the question 30 minutes ago with that. We could have just done that and been done. Okay. Create your free every dollar budget today, the simplest way to budget for your life.