Speaker Meeting 2017! Chapter 4: Money Part 2

---

Let me tell you a few stories about my gambling addiction from Vegas trips to betting online because I hope in sharing my own shortcomings it helps each of us to accept and forgive what we have in our own lives. If you missed part 1 of the money section or want to start at the beginning, here are the other chapters!

Speaker Meeting 2017: An Unforgettably Honest History of My Life in Addiction and Recovery!

Chapter 1: Welcome at https://steemit.com/dtube/@jerrybanfield/schmd2cm
Chapter 2: Sex at https://steemit.com/dtube/@jerrybanfield/txgjjuij
Chapter 3: Alcohol at https://steemit.com/dtube/@jerrybanfield/60ilq8m2
Chapter 4: Money Part 1 at https://steemit.com/dtube/@jerrybanfield/8q8xb602

---

► Watch on DTube
► Watch Source (IPFS)

Prefer to read? Here is the full transcript from the second half the money section!

Give it 6 months, and I met my wife, and we started dating. Now, I'd had a girlfriend right when I moved to USF, but I ended up breaking up with her because I just didn't feel like it ... I was trying to become a better person with her. I wasn't. I was becoming a worse person with her, so we broke up. Then I started dating my wife. Right from the beginning, I wanted to be a better person with my wife. To me, that's the defining characteristic. If you're with someone who's truly good for you, you want to be a better person with them. You don't want to slide and go downhill and circle the drain with them. You want to be the very best version of you that you can be. This is what I experienced with my wife.Right in the beginning, I had an unbelievable level of honesty with my wife. I said, "I've got 3 things in my life I really care about. You, alcohol, and video games. I'm willing to give 2 of them up for you, as needed." She's like, "That's good. I don't even know what my problems are, so we should have fun with this." That's what we did. I did something crazy with my wife. I went on a cruise with her after we'd only been dating 2 months, and after having had a hellish experience before going out of town- I told you about that out of town trip I took with that girl I worked with before. That was one of the worst 2 days of my life. And yet, I looked forward to it so much. I was so excited. I was so scared it wasn't gonna happen, and that was one of the worst trips I ever experienced in my life. So, this is it this time. Nope, I went and did it again. I went on a cruise with my wife.Now, she wasn't my wife at the time. We'd just been dating 2 months. I'll tell you what, the gambling is what I was worried about. As soon as I found out that we were going somewhere that had gambling, both at the destination- we took a cruise to Nassau, in The Bahamas- not only at the destination, but the cruise ship had a casino in it, and I figured I could manage my drinking okay with my wife. I figured I could manage my emotions and feelings using alcohol. Then, though, the gambling. I was like, damn, I don't know if I can do that and keep that under control, too. Because, as I've told you, the crazy really comes out when I gamble, because I have to drink in order to gamble. I certainly wouldn't wanna go gamble sober. That'd be boring and stressful and anxiety provoking. Why would I wanna do that? Thank god.So, guess what? I figure, okay, my wife and I both figure that the second day on the cruise, Saturday, when we go to Nassau and we go to the Bahamas and we go to the casino, we both figure that's gonna be it. That's gonna be the day where I gamble and just leave her alone and forget about her and everything goes downhill. Well, I was so afraid, so worried about that, and thankfully, I wasn't interested. The casino had these higher limits and I hadn't brought a ton of money to really gamble properly. See, if you go burn up your money right away, that's no fun, is it? So, thankfully, my wife and I on this 3 day cruise- left Friday afternoon, got back Monday morning- made it through Friday night and Saturday just hanging out with her, having kind of a normal person drinking. A drink here, a drink there, no big deal. Didn't get drunk, nothing, right?So, Sunday comes around. Both of us are feeling real good, like yeah, we've got this. I said something to my wife that annoyed her in the morning, and when she got annoyed, I got annoyed. Then, I didn't want to deal with my emotions at all, and all I knew how to do was withdraw, and so guess what happens? We get back to the boat after going out and having a lovely adventure in Paradise, doing some kayaking and walking around on the beach. Outwardly, no issue. Then I get back. I've got all these emotions I've stuffed down, and there's nothing to do for a couple hours. Guess what? I haven't really explored that casino on the boat yet.I actually take my wife to the casino with me. I gamble some. I win a little bit, and I give her gambling money. She hadn't sat down and gambled before. I give her gambling money. She gets cleaned out of $100 right away. She's like, "This isn't any fun. I don't get the point of this." Meanwhile, I'm doing pretty good. I've actually won enough. I'm up a few hundred, so I gave her money to gamble with. We go to gamble and I had another amazing level of honesty with her. I said, "See, it's not a big deal with me when I lose, because then I don't have anything to do. When the gambling's really bad for me is when I actually win some. Then things get out of hand."So, after dinner, I left my wife alone on the cruise ship for the rest of the night. She relaxed and went to a show and had a good time. Meanwhile, I went back to the casino, and man, I crushed it. At the craps table, I was destroying. I had just a few hundred dollars, maybe $200 or $300 in cash, and then I had like $500 by dinnertime with my wife. I don't know what I had at the craps table, but I had enough to pay for our entire cruise, all the expenses. I don't know if I had $800 or $1,000 or $1,500. I had a lot of money after I got off the craps table. I was feeling real good. I was feeling like the odds were really on my side. And remember, I told you I had this big win playing 3 card poker in Mississippi, that I'd won $1,400 playing maybe $75 a hand.Big boy gets up there. Gets up there, he's all liquored up. $150 a hand in 3 card. That's $50 chips down 3 times. Now, if you actually hit a card on that, if you actually get a little hand together, yeah, you could pull in thousands of dollars at once, $2,500+ at once with a win. Big boy Jerry rolls up to the table, sits down, and I got cleaned completely out in maybe 30 minutes. All my money just got taken straight away. At least $800, if not $1,000 or $1,500. Now, I was all hyped up, proud of myself, pay for the whole trip, been winning all night, and that 3 card game just smashed me. Take your money. Took all money.Guess what? My wife really got to see the crazy come out the first time. I came back, got to the room, sobbing and crying, what a stupid person I am, I'm awful. I learned to really let my feelings out with my wife, to be vulnerable, to show her how I was really feeling, to not man up and just talk junk, but no, to really show her how awful I felt inside. That's what my wife got. At the end of the evening, I came back and just cried myself to sleep on her. Then, oh man, the hangover the next day. There's nothing like going through port customs in a long line with a hell of a hangover. I'm glad to not do that again. And thankfully, my wife drove my car back 2 hours for us across Florida as I slept on and off on the window.My gambling didn't go away, but it did seem to go into remission for a little while. Once I moved in with my wife, she saw how bad my gambling was. I wasn't very inclined to go gamble around her, and my friends took a little while off of planning gambling trips themselves. They had things to do, and they were getting married and things like that. The last gambling trip I took was another trip out to Vegas. This is it this time. It'll be different this time than the last time, I swore. And it was.In 2014, my friend got married. If you remember from the alcohol section, my friend's bachelor party was at the end of February, beginning of March. That was the last time I had a drink, was in April 2014. Not long after this, it all came crumbling down. With this last Vegas trip, there was a big difference. My dad was dead, and dad was the drinker, the gambler, the lady's man that I looked up to. Dad was dead this time. Dad was the one I always called on those days when I was feeling just like I was feeling. I'd come to depend on having my wife or my dad available on those days when I ran out of money and just couldn't handle the pain, or ran out of alcohol, whatever it was.This time, I went with my friends on the bachelor party to Vegas, and it was an epic trip. It was also a very painful trip. How'd the trip go? We flew out on Friday. These things always start on Friday. I think I posted something on Facebook, #drinksonaplane. I started drinking at the airport, I think it might've been Tampa. I started drinking at the airport, and then I got drinks on a plane. Now, I got 4 mini bottles on the plane. I had sobered up, by the time we landed in Vegas, and man, I was annoyed. It took hours. My friends' flights were delayed. I couldn't find another drink. I ended up eating and sobering completely up at McDonald's and feeling really sorry for myself.Then we got the trip started. I brought $1,000 or so for my gambling budget for this trip. At least $1,000. I dropped it all, plus I brought- my dad used to carry around this big wad of hundreds, back from his days being at the racetrack and a gambler. We knew he was dying, he gave my mom his money clip. He'd always carried around, he tried to have at least $1,000 when he left the house. He almost got robbed several times, fooling around with this big wad of money. 13 year old gang of kids at the mall, one of them packing heat probably, sees my dad whip out several thousand dollars to buy some Godiva chocolate for mom. Dad almost got robbed that one time, fooling around with this. He bluffed his way out of it, acting like he had a gun and he was gonna shoot the kids down if he fooled around with him.My dad carried around this wad of money, and my mom gave me 2 of my dad's $100 bills out of the last clip of money that my dad had. I had one of those in my wallet for an emergency fund, and then I had another one at home in my little fire box. I went to Vegas. I had dad's hundred, how I looked at it, and I had at least $1,000 of my own gambling money. The first night, everything went wrong for me. I tried to pace myself. I tried to not blow all. And by the end of the night, I think it was 6 or 7 in the morning Vegas time, so I'd been drinking 20+ hours at this point, I'd been on a plane, and I finally got down to just dad's hundred in my wallet.After getting wrecked at every game, 4 card, 3 card, everything I lost, lost, lost, lost. So many times, the craps table had been my redemption. I went and dropped dad's hundred on the pass line, and then I lost it. The first roll that came out was like a 2, and I lost it. Then, I mentally lost it. I had this weird sensation. These kinds of things happened to me when I was drinking a lot. I had this weird sensation, and as I expressed it to my friends, I said, "God doesn't want me to gamble anymore." Really weird sensation. I think I even pulled out extra money out of the ATM that night, too. So, I think I'd already taken a cash advance or something, or pulled something out of my bank account. I went through $1,000 or $1,500 that first night, which was more than I'd ever lost at once gambling, at least out of my own money, not out of gambling winnings.So, I woke up the next day, absolute suicidal depression. Here I am, it's Saturday, and I'm here with my friends until Monday, and I'm out of money. I am out of money. I've got no money left. I'm already broke. My business is nearly bankrupt. I have a god awful hangover, and there's no one to call. Dad's dead. My wife's not gonna wanna hear about it. My mom's dealing with dad's grief. She's barely gonna hang on. I just thought, I'm pretty sure they've already figured that gambling addicts, alcoholics, drug addicts would be trying to jump out of the windows.We were staying- what hotel was it? Was it MGM or was it somewhere else? We stayed at MGM the first time. I think we stayed somewhere else. It was fancy, like the Bellagio or somewhere like that. It was a really tall hotel, and I just wanted to jump out the window, but I was too damn sick to even hardly get out of bed. I took a bunch of Advil to try and get by. I figured they probably had planned ahead and made the windows so that some fairly weak little drunk like me couldn't just smash through the window or even take a chair to it, because there'd be too many suicides. They'd have to fix windows and make the [news 01:23:35] all the time, so they probably made the windows pretty damn strong on the 11th floor or whatever I was on. I was really depressed, I wanted to die, but I couldn't even do it.So, I called my mother and my mother was really scared. She thought something horrible happened, and thank god it was just more of the normal crap. I told my friends, I swore off everything. I said, "No drinking, no gambling. I'm done." By that evening, my friends had convinced me to gamble with their money, because I said, "I'm done. I don't have anymore money. I'm just gonna hang out with you guys and spend some time." I missed the whole day with my friends, except maybe I got out around 8 at night, after hours laying in bed and having a hangover. I think I went to dinner then with my friends. I gambled with my friends' money all day on Saturday.I told my wife, as I talked to her later, I said, "Thank god I won't have to fly home from Vegas with another god awful hangover," because, man, you wanna talk about the plane crashing? I would bet on a plane that crashes, there are a significant percentage of people on the plane that are playing for it to crash. When I flew back from Vegas last time, I was playing to God the plane would crash because I felt so bad. Then everyone would feel bad. Oh, poor Jerry, he died in a plane crash. That's an honorable way to go, right? Not like he killed himself in his apartment with a gun or something, but he crashed in a plane.So, guess what happens? Wake up Sunday morning, no hangover. I'm feeling hope again. I am feeling hope today. Not sure about what I'm gonna do later, but we go to the Bellagio buffet, and man, I got into some gluttony. I had at least 7 plates of food. I ate everything I could get my hands on. I probably had 6 or 8 different kinds of meat, if not 10. I went nuts. I stuffed my face with everything you could imagine. Remember, just the day before, I said never again am I going to drink or gamble.Well, we went over to I think it was that Malibu, that Hawaii casino there. It's all beachy and stuff, which is totally pointless to me because I already live in Florida. I think it was the Malibu little casino area, all beachy and party themey, drinks with little hats coming out. My friends gave me some money to gamble with again. I said, okay, I'll gamble with my friends' money. Well, he wasn't doing to good that day. He lost, and I lost his money. So, instead of losing just once, he was losing twice as fast with me gambling for him. He quickly decided, you know what, he'd rather just be able to gamble longer just himself. He wouldn't loan me anymore money.I'm sitting there, and I remembered on my last Vegas trip, I had ran out of money on the third day on a 5 day trip, and the last 2 days, I'd pulled money on a credit card cash advance, and I remember feeling really grateful at some point that I hadn't wasted those 2 days by just hanging out with my friends and not gambling. I remembered this, and I'm like, let's go to work, baby. Let's do this again. I don't care what I said before. I don't care the promises I made to my wife. I'm in Vegas, let's go. I got this. I had made it through the morning and a few rounds of the gambling without getting a drink, and I said, "Let me have a double vodka. Let's get started." This was probably about 1 in the afternoon. I started on the double vodkas. I went over to the ATM and I took out something like $500. I took out a bunch more money, and I lost nearly all of it by the time we went to the craps table.I had my last $100 or so left on the craps table. I had pulled about as much money as I had left in my checking account, and I don't know what happened, but that craps table was on fire. There was this older Asian guy, oh man, he hit every point, he hit ever number. I won over $2,000 at the craps table. I actually probably won $3,000 or $4,000. I was just giving my friends $50, $100 chips, because they were sitting there, playing reasonable. I went and put my whole hundred on the pass line, again, and I won. $200, won. I just won and won and won. I started giving all my friends, I'm like, "Quit playing $25. Put $100 on that pass line. Here, you quit playing $50. Here's another $100. Get in this. Be a man. Get in the game, for real."I got all my friends with these high stacks on here, and all of just won. It was ridiculous. There was this one black guy there who was betting on the don't pass line, and he got cleaned out. It was hilarious. The whole table's winning. This one guy's like, "They're gonna lose," and he lost thousands of dollars. He was betting like $400, $800, and just getting cleaned out. Meanwhile, the rest of the table is just erupting. The guy throws out a 4, and I'm betting everything on it. I'm getting euphoric recall just telling you about it. To me, this is the best of what you get out of gambling. I was so drunk by then, I was so overjoyed. I had pink chip, $1,000 chips. I'd never even gotten my hands on one of those before. I dropped one of them walking out. My friends picked it up, and they thought, "Oh, we shouldn't give it to him. He's too drunk. He's just gonna lose it."When I cashed out, I had $2,500 or so. We were across the street from Caesar's Palace at this point. I'm like, "We gotta go to Caesar's Palace," because my other 2 Vegas trips ended at Caesar's Palace. I busted out both times at the end. I'm like, "It's the last night of the trip," and they're all like, "No, we're gonna head up to bed." I'm like, "F that. I'm going to Caesar's Palace." Not only that, I actually had won all the money I'd spent back on the whole trip, just $100 bills all over. I'm like, "I'm taking a limo by myself across the street." You can see Caesar's Palace across the street, and I took a limo. The guy's like, "It's $80, are you sure?" I showed him, I'm like, "I got all this money. Yes, I'm sure. Take me across the street." I paid $100 to literally go across the street, because when I got drunk ... Hey, I got this. I'm big time. I'm the man now.I went in and they had this Texas Hold'em rebuy tournament, just like I used to play online. It was like $70, and I have so much money, I'm just throwing it in. I just go all in on every hand. Bust out, go rebuy. Drop another. I'm like, hell, I've got all these hundreds. And I got a big stack together. Eventually, I got lucky and won, and then I get a big stack to play in the tournament. I was being pretty loud and obnoxious, and I only had hundreds. I didn't have any ones or anything, and I didn't have any small chips because this was a poker tournament, so they're all tournament chips. They're not like the $1, $5. Normally, you tip the servers when they bring you a drink with a poker chip, but I didn't have anything, and I didn't think to ask for it.So, they actually cut me off from drinking halfway through the poker tournament. Man, you wanna talk about pissed? I couldn't even see what I did wrong. I wasn't thinking about tipping the server. I'm just like, "It's a tournament. I don't have any ones. I'm not gonna ask to break $100," which I'm sure she could've broke $100. Anyway, they cut me off. I got really pissed, and I lost all my chips soon after getting pissed. I started making stupid decisions and being afraid of running out of liquor. When you've been drinking all day and being stupid as hell, not too fun. So, I end up going over to the craps table again, and I nearly lost all of the rest of the money on the craps table. I got down to $100 or $200. I'm like, my god if I lose this, I'm just gonna kill myself.Somehow, divine intervention, it blew up again to like $2,000. I lost all the way down to $100, and I won all the way back up to $2,000. I ended up with $1,600 in cash still. Then, I had like $400 on the pass line, and I lost the last time, finally. I was getting hungry by this point. Now, thankfully, they just cut me off in the poker room. I was getting drinks like crazy out at the craps table. I guess the guy didn't have it in for me enough to tell the whole casino to cut me off, but just his little poker room. Then, I take my $1,600, and you wanna talk about a sad case? Look who's all alone now, walking back to the casino with all my money, feeling really hungry, really tired, and letting the depression start to sink in. The trip's over. Now, the party's over and everybody's gone, it doesn't really matter, or am I just hungover? Yup. That's exactly what it was.I sat there and I had a pathetic, lonely breakfast by myself. Then, I ran upstairs and proceeded to wake all of my friends up at 4 in the morning with Eminem's song Fack. He snuck it into one of his greatest release albums. It's a nasty song, the one I told you about in the sex section, with the gerbils and everything. I got that on my phone. I wake all my friends up. It's lucky they didn't beat me to death, because they had plane flights home the next day, too, earlier than mine. I wake all my friends up in the middle of the night, showing them all the cash I've still got after coming home from Caesar's Palace and nearly losing it all. I'm just up in everyone's face, screaming the lyrics to Fack at the top of my lungs.I finally pass out in my bed from just exhaustion, and man, the next day. Oh my god. I thought I was sick on the last plane flight. This was brutal. I was at California Pizza Kitchen, like I'm really gonna die this time. Please God, let the plane crash. Let me get through this. I couldn't even finish my pizza at California Pizza Kitchen, I was so sick. I made it back home, just felt awful. Horrible. Then, the party's over, but hey, I had so much fun gambling last time, then just a month later, I had that night where I gambled online, that I talked about before. I was drunk. I'd been playing with my friends online. I texted all my friends about a Vegas trip. I got myself all worked up about gambling, and I dropped $500 on a Chinese gambling website with my credit card, and within maybe 2 or 3 hours, I lost all of it.I was playing really stupid, and I talked before about threatening suicide if I lost. I did that, and the person still cleaned me out. I guess God was onto my bluff by now. I'd threatened enough times and it'd been delivered that, all right, you're gonna really have to deal with this stuff this time. I'm not bailing you out. You gotta do a bit better now. Thankfully, that last night. The last thing I did when I was drinking, I was on customer support with the Chinese website, trying desperately to let them allow me to put more money on that night. Thankfully, I was too drunk to think of things like, just set up another account, use another credit card. Thankfully, I didn't think anything like that.Up until this point, with my drinking and stuff, I'd been lying to myself that I was managing it and it wasn't that bad. I woke up the next day after gambling online, and I had thrown up blood, and I realized that if the online gambling problem wasn't actually fixed, that I was really screwed. I had this rare moment of honesty. Which was difficult with drinking, because with drinking, I figured it's fun, I can manage it. But with the gambling, I saw the next time I got drunk, or maybe the time after that or maybe the time after that, I absolutely would gamble online again, and there was nothing I could do about it.It didn't matter if I swore I wouldn't. It didn't matter if I tried hard not to. It didn't matter. I would gamble online again, and I would absolutely ruin my finances doing it, and therein was a very good path to suicide. Instead of just looking at closing my business and bankruptcy, very likely getting in a suicidal depression one night and, bam. Then, probably, my wife would leave as I'm screaming, raving on gambling. She'd probably go stay with her parents. I'd be all alone. Bam, dead. I saw the certainty of that. Not only that, but there's nothing you can do about it.That Vegas trip before, I remembered it was just a month ago, I swore I'd never drink and gamble again, and here I was, hungover in bed, having drank and gambled online, which I hadn't done since 2006. I'd been able to lie to myself and say, "I don't do that anymore." Jerry doesn't gamble online anymore. I'd been able to lie to myself and say, "This is fixed," but it's not. It wasn't, and it's still not. I have to work everyday, that's why I'm doing this. I go back and remember this stuff so that I don't fool myself into thinking, "Well, I've been sober almost 3 years. I haven't gambled in awhile. I'm fixed now. I can go do that stuff again."A normal person doesn't have a desire to do stuff that they get burned on really bad again. I'm grateful today to act and function mostly like a normal person. Then I have thoughts that want to guide me off the path, which I guess that's pretty normal. Thankfully, the gambling thing got me to go to alcoholics anonymous, because I realized, there's no way I would gamble online if I wasn't drunk, that I had to have been drunk to gamble online, and if I wasn't drunk, I wouldn't gamble online, and the only hope I had for not gambling online, not killing myself, was to not drink.But I knew I couldn't do that either. I knew I couldn't just say I'm gonna stay sober. I'd just done that a month ago. I swore to God, to anyone who'd listen, to my wife, to my mother, that I wouldn't drink and gamble again, and that hadn't even kept me sober for 24 hours. This time, I figured I'm hopeless. The only hope is to try something new. That's when I made the desperate prayer, "God, please, I'll do anything to stay sober, because I know I'm gonna gamble again and ruin my life online if I don't."Then the thought came to me, AA might be part of anything, right? Yes, okay. I'll go to AA then. Thank god I scheduled a meeting for the next Tuesday. This was a Tuesday, but I had to go to dad's memorial, so I was traveling. I said, okay, the next day I'm probably gonna drink is Tuesday. In fact, the next day I have to drink is Tuesday, and I'll probably gamble that day, too. I went to the AA meeting. I saw the choices. You go to that AA meeting, or you drink. There's no other options. There's no way in hell after going to dad's memorial you're gonna stay home while your wife's at work and not get drunk and play a bunch of Black Ops 2 Zombies, and then get bored and gamble online. That's what's gonna happen.So, I went to that Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. I felt gratitude, and thank god then I didn't have any desire to drink or gamble that day. I talked enough about the alcohol section. I'm gonna talk more in recovery about the transformation in AA. What's still left here is the after effects of the gambler, of being the gambler, because when you do things like gamble, it makes powerful alterations to how you see things like money. I've called this the money section because while you may not be able to relate to gambling, you might be able to relate to never being able to hold onto your money. You might be able to relate to, "I'm gonna do better with my money," and then you make the same damn stupid decision you made with your money beforehand.I was pretty good with my money before I started gambling. I always operated in cash before I started gambling. I might've had like $1,000 in student loans before I started gambling. When I started gambling, I got this toxic idea, this money is an evil thing idea, and I started to make more and more poor decisions with my money. I even eventually took cash advances and borrowed money to gamble with on that last Vegas trip and on the Vegas trip before that, and the last time I gambled. The problem is, just stopping gambling doesn't fix all the deeper money issues.Just 6 months into my sobriety, or less than that even, I picked up a new pseudo-gambling habit called speculating. This was in the format of trading crypto currencies. BitCoin. I was buying and selling BitCoin back and forth, trying to make money off of it. I was right in the sense that I believed BitCoin would have a higher value in the future. That's not a good way to go about investing though if you don't have a plan. What are you gonna do? How are you gonna buy it? For example, now, I have a Dash Master [Node 01:42:02]. I've bought it, and I plan to hold onto it indefinitely. I bought it, and I have no plans to sell it. I just hold it. That's an investment plan, and if it goes down below $10 a Dash, I'll try and buy another one. That's an investment plan.When I started out with BitCoin, I just started out emotionally. My brother said it was very much like gambling. And that's exactly what I was doing with it. I was gambling with it, except this time, it was in my business. This time, I wasn't using my money. I had a client who'd paid me hundreds of thousands of dollars in ad budget that then I was managing and spending for them. I was using the client's money to gamble with. It wasn't my money. It was the client's money they trusted me with, and I started gambling on BitCoin. I started buying it and trying to sell it and time the market, and I lost about $5,000 in 2014, when I was already close to broke and already close to bankrupt. I lost the client's money, and at some points, I had as much as $10,000+ of the client's money tied up in BitCoin transactions.My brother, on the day of his wedding, I'm sitting there on my phone fooling around with these BitCoin transactions. It felt just like gambling, except my mind said, "You're not really gambling. You're not at the casino. You're not playing cards. You're investing." Just messing around with something, with no plan, with your emotions, most amateur investors, like I've been, you buy something when it's high and hot out of all the excitement, and then you end up getting afraid and selling stuff when it's low. The average investor simply puts their money in and either gets lucky or has a plan and makes some money or goes through and works out until the thing makes money and is patient. Or, what a lot of amateur investors do, throw their money in when things are high, sell their money when things are low, and feel like they got victimized somehow.That's exactly how I felt. The market just went down. This was just bad luck. I ended up at one point, I had 50 or 60 BitCoin, which now would be worth 50 or 60,000, but I actually bought a bunch of it when it was just $170 a BitCoin, and I was using the client's money, though. The same thing. Even after I quit doing it, at my brother's wedding a few months later, the price went down so low. Now, here's the tough thing. I was right about the price, but it's not right to use someone else's money to invest when they haven't given it to you for that reason. I sold all of it after I made a small profit, but overall, I lost at least $5,000 buying and selling and trading BitCoin. I forgot to put that on my taxes as a capital loss, also, so small tax deduction missed.Then, I returned to sanity. I realized, you know what? If my client's giving me this money, I need to actually have that in the bank. So, I took a personal loan to get back the money I'd lost from the client, and then thankfully, right after I got the personal loan, the client gave me the rest of the project to pay their money out. Really good timing on that. I saw there are some good things you can do with investing, but you need to be healthy when it comes to money. You need to look at money as a game, not something that's evil or disgusting or similar to gambling. I've had a lot of work on my point of view about money. And now, I'm grateful, today I'm able to invest in something and do it with a plan, do it with some emotional sanity, do it with some patience.For example, after BitCoin doubled in price, if I'd have just held onto that BitCoin, I'd have made $20,000 or $30,000. But you see, when you're doing something for the wrong reasons, you'll miss out on the opportunities. When you're doing something out of ego gratification, out of proving you're right, you'll miss out on the great opportunities with it. When you do something with the intent to love and help and be generous to other people, you'll make opportunities where there don't even seem to be any that exist, and you'll seemingly get lucky by participating in things at the right time.For example, my friend told me all about how this new currency, similar to BitCoin but updated with better features, called Dash, he told me about he had all this excitement. My friend that he works with is gonna release a way to turn cash into Dash back and forth, and that's a huge innovation. I'm like, wow, this is really low priced right now. Then, I learned about get a Master Node, which pays you dividends. Yes, it actually pays you out money. See, when I was trading BitCoin, I didn't get any payments. If it went down, I lost money. If it went up, I made money. But on the Dash, you buy into a Master Node, you actually get payments. I've made $100 in the first 3 or 4 weeks of my dividend payments. I'm grateful. Now I've been restored to sanity, I can do some true investing.But what did I need to do first? I needed to learn about investing. Not just go into the game and think I know, but learn something about it. I read Tony Robbins' book, Money Master the Game. That's what motivated me to go ahead, make a plan, make an investment. Then I read another book, What I Learned Losing A Million Dollars in the Stock Market. I learned and I read some books, and that has helped me learn a new productive way about money. Now, I'm finally getting some freedom from that gambler mindset. Finally getting into, "Well, I need some investments, but I also need some cash, and I need to pay my debts down as fast as possible."I'm finally through recovery, getting restored to sanity with my gambling, where I have money today, and over the last 2 years, I've seen some miracles in my money. I've paid down over $100,000 in debt, in personal loans and credit cards. I've only got a $4,000 personal loan left. All my credit cards now pay the balance in full automatically every month. That's a miracle, because I had credit card debt for 8 or 9 years. Since I started gambling heavy online, I ran credit card debt. I'm finally out of credit card debt now, and I've had some amazing opportunities come my way with getting money in exchange for making videos just like this.I'm really grateful. I'll talk lots more in the recovery section about getting better, about healing. But the amazing thing is, through this journey, that I'm able to do things like invest, and I'm able to make sound financial decisions. I'm able to be free of credit card debt today, after having voluntarily walked into things like gambling, which made disastrous changes to how I looked at money, disastrous changes to how I approached spending money in my life. Taking ridiculous risks. Being really cheap in other areas that weren't related to pleasure. Something before, like an investment, would've looked horribly boring to me. What do you mean you put the money into that and you just don't touch it indefinitely, maybe for 20 or 30 or 50 years? That's boring. I don't wanna do that.So, I'm grateful today that I have a healthy viewpoint about money today. Money is a game. Money can bring a lot of tools that are useful to help other people, and at the same time, money does not buy happiness. Money well spent can assist in producing happiness, but just having money does not bring happiness. In fact, full happiness is possible with no money at all. I'm grateful today to not live a gambler's lifestyle, even as I lived for years as a gambler without actually gambling most of the time. I'm grateful today. To show my gratitude, I share my experience being sick with you today, so that you can relate to some things, so that you can relate to making irresponsible decisions with your money, so that you can relate to gambling, if that's something you've done in one form or another, so that you can relate to how it looks to be sick and then see that it's possible to be healthy again, to see that it's possible to give up these things that you might think define who you are.I thought of myself very much as a gambler once I started gambling. I'm not a gambler today. I take calculated risks. I look for asymmetrical risk reward, like with this Dash Master Node. Sure, I could lose everything, but there's a good chance I'll make 10 or 100 or 1,000 times as much as I put into it. That's an asymmetrical calculated risk. There's not the emotion in it of being right. If I lose all the money, oh well. I tried. I'll try something else. If I make some money, I'm no smart, spectacular person. I was given the right information by the universe at the right time, and I was given the right motivation. I had enough painful learning experience to guide me into taking action in a productive way.I'm grateful today to not be in the habit of gambling with my business, to just build a self sustaining business that helps people as much as possible today. I'm honored you listened so much. You're one of the very few who's made it through this entire thing here. I'm honored to have the chance to share with you. I hope so much that this is helpful to you. To look inside of a sick life, or what I call a sick, insane life, and experience the health and recovery of getting into a life filled with happiness and joy on a daily basis that doesn't take putting money at risk to feel happy, that doesn't get into anxiety and fear over doing stupid things with money. Thank you very much for listening to this today, or watching it. I hope you have a wonderful day today, and I'm excited to share more about getting healthier with you and getting through and growing, in the recovery section.