I uncovered my husbands debts 2 weeks ago. I said we were over, separated but we are still co-habiting. Our families & friends both know ( bad timing with family events, weddings etc the week I found out, forced this)
We have been together 14 years, married 4 & have two daughters (13&7). He has always been bad with money, years ago I uncovered a loan & helped him pay it off, it wasn't solely blamed on gambling at the time but since then hes always claimed he manages money well & i believed him.Â
Back to 2 weeks ago, I never would open his mail usually but I opened 2 letters, both credit card accounts. I found hidden letters for another 2 credit cards & a bank loan for a large amount. A credit report showed he was in what i thought was £11,000 debt between it all. He confessed the sports betting had spiralled, he was doing 30-50 bets a week, blowing his entire wage then living off credit cards. He took out the loan a month ago because he couldn't afford the credit card repayments & paid off 2 cards. He accepted full responsibility for our marriage problems over the past year & has signed up for counselling & attended a meeting. Initially he didnt want to hand over control of his bank, but he has now given me his bank card.Â
We sat down to go through the exact debt a week after id found the initial. During this he confessed he still had an active credit card with debt, a significant bank loan & a credit union account with a loan, on top of the already existing loan he has. So what i thought was £11000 was actually more than this.Â
Im looking advice on what to do, I have been completely devastated at what he has done to our family, and especially me. Since I found out I have been an emotional mess, can't sleep, can barely do the minimum I need too & i am so rundown I am making myself sick with worry. Im off work with stress, as its another group of people i cant face explaining too.
Just when i thought I could help him & try to move forward i found out that he was still lying from the start & the debt is far worse than I first thought. How do I even go about moving forward? Should I even, or am I going to be constantly worrying?Â
I dont know if I can ever forgive him for what he has taken away. Is this going to be years of me mothering his finances, no holidays & me carrying the entire family, like ive already been doing for years..
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What a hard decision for you to have to make. Although people can offer advice only you can make that final decision I'm afraid. Is it the fact that he's gambling which has led you to this point or the fact that he's not been honest with you? Do you love him enough to work through this? Will your's and your children's lives be better without him? All hard questions to think about. You say that you don't usually open his mail but you did on this occasion: maybe I'm wrong but were you already suspicious that something was going on? As a gambling addict myself (only 21 days gambling free) I found the hardest thing was to open up to my partner and tell him what I'd been doing and the debts I'd accumulated. Maybe your husband has been wanting to tell you but has been to afraid to because he feared losing you and the children. I'm making no excuses for him by saying that, just trying to think why he's been silent about it. You've obviously helped him financially in the past so maybe he feels/felt doubly guilty about racking up debts again. Imho he has to acknowledge that he has a problem and seriously want to do something about it. He has to take the necessary steps to change his behaviour and stop gambling. There are lots of places he can speak with people about his problem and get the help he needs. He can always phone the people here on GamCare. I guess that the big question is do you want to work through this with him or have you had enough? You have to do what's best for you and the children whether with or without him. I wish you luck whatever you decide to do. x
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The honest truth very few people with this type of addiction fully recover where they never bet again those people i have witnessed in Ga they know they have an issue and are very extreme in their approach even though these people managed 5 10 20+ years bet free they behave like they are still on day one i honestly can see why they are so successful most people dont put enough time into recovery and dont stick with it long term for a person to have any success long term u cannot have single percent desire to gamble which very few people have since coming on here i have witnessed many people relapsing after long periods of time i was one of these people and even though i have managed 2+ years i still have a long way to go
With the Uk economy in so much trouble right now its certainly  not the ideal time to be shouldering tens of thousands of pounds of gambling debtÂ
I was in around 15K of gambling debt at 23 and it took and IVA and 3 years of basically living under a rock to clear it , bare in mind this was a decade ago and the cost of living was a lot cheaper and I didn't have a house or a family to pay forÂ
In all honesty I would boot him out for a couple of months send him to live with some other family members if possible it will either be a wakeup call for him to sort his s**t out or he will just continue puntingÂ
In either case you will have a much clearer picture of how committed he is to repairing the damage to your relationships as at the moment it sounds very very murky
And finally this is not your fault gambling unfortunately prays on the greedy and sometimes it can get very out of control for something that is such a trivial activityÂ
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good luck
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Thankyou for the replies. Thought I should give an update after my first post.
@redragon- i never had any suspicion of anything, the only reason I even opened the mail was one for the letters had no name just address and this was one of the credit card statements.Â
The past 3 weeks have been a whirlwind since it all came out. We sat down & went through every bank account/credit card/loan & he gave me all the details to access them all. Some of the debt was actually easily resolved, paying off the high interest & narrowing it down now to 2, which should be more manageable.Â
I got him a joint account card which he puts a weekly allowance on & i can see the transactions that come out then.Â
He has started going to meetings (one a week) & these seem to be helpful, ( it was them that suggested if he wasn't ready to handover his banking to me, he wasn't ready to quit gambling).He's also on the waiting list for 1-1 counselling.
As for me, I did ring gamcare & chat to an advisor who was really helpful just to actually speak about it all & get it off my chest. Within my area unfortunatley there's actually not much support for family members of GA, so I have found alot of help through sites like this & the weekly chat room.
Overall we are in alot better place at the minute, I still have my wobbles but I think that may always be the case after so much trust has been lost.
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