Frugal Stay-At-Home Mom Finds Out Her Husband Has Been Spending $1,000 A Month On Phone Games
He has an addiction, and they need to treat it as such.
Gorodenkoff / Shutterstock In a clip from "The Dave Ramsey Show," a financial podcast that offers money advice, a frugal stay-at-home mother revealed the shocking amount that her husband spends on iPhone games each month.
She admitted to Dave Ramsey that she was fed up, and asked for advice on how to handle the situation.
She found out that her husband spends $1,000 a month on phone games.
Although their household income is $85,000, and she's both a stay-at-home mom and the bill-payer, her 29-year-old husband spends over a grand a month on phone games. "When you say that out loud, does it sound as crazy to you as it does to me?" Ramsey questioned upon hearing the outrageous number.
"I pinch money wherever I can so that we can get those paid," the mom told Ramsey of her family's bills.
He recommended that she look into getting her husband professional help, which she agreed was necessary, as they cannot afford to be wasting $1000 a month on games.
Ramsey informed the woman that these phone games are intended to be so captivating that people waste both their money and hours of their time. "They've carefully designed the games to create a dopamine hit to cause you to come back again and again and again," he said. "They designed these games to be addictive."
"It's also true, for instance, the way the videos now work on slot machines," Ramsey added. "They carefully design those to be addictive, and your husband is involved in an addictive behavior loop."
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He told the stay-at-home mother that her husband's problem wasn't a money issue, but rather an addiction problem.
"If your husband was doing some other form of addiction, what would you do?" he asked rhetorically. "Well, you would demand that he get some help and you would begin to see someone to build language and a narrative to talk to him in such a way that he's destroying himself and his family with this behavior."
The stay-at-home mother agreed with Ramsey's advice, sharing that she does have some difficulty addressing the issue with her husband, as he often appears glazed over. “It feels like I'm talking at him,” she said, adding that she often feels like she’s nagging him when she attempts to have a discussion.
Ramsey advised the woman to tell her husband that they must see a marriage counselor because she's afraid that their marriage will end because he's an addict. "You are completely out of control. I'm going to go see a marriage counselor to try to save our marriage. I hope you'll come," he encouraged her to say.
Ramsey added that she should make the appointment, and see the counselor, regardless of whether or not her husband agrees to come. "Have that person start to teach you how to speak to an addict to give you any possibility of getting through the fog of this and into his brain."
According to AddictionHelp, around 5.8% of the general population struggle with and suffer from a compulsive buying disorder or shopping addiction. Like any other addiction, it's a disease and not something that people choose to partake in.
In the face of financial strain and threats to their marriage, it's critical to approach these issues with empathy and understanding so that all of the challenges can be properly addressed and hopefully fixed.
Whether this woman's husband suffers from the addiction or not is up for debate, but in the end, she must make sure to equip herself with the necessary tools to combat it. As Ramsey put it, the woman must remind her partner that “he's a husband and a father more than he is a game player on a freaking iPhone.”
Nia Tipton is a Chicago-based entertainment, news, and lifestyle writer whose work delves into modern-day issues and experiences.