The Perfect Storm

What I'm sharing with you is heavy, and it deserves to be met with clarity, respect, and honesty, not platitudes.

First, let me say this plainly:

I was not careless. I was deceived.

That distinction matters.

I was not careless, but I assumed that my wife would be responsible enough to handle our finances, and she was not.

I fell in love with a woman 20 years younger than me, and never realized that she was only looking for a place to hang her coat, at no cost, and give her full access to our bank and finances, after marriage and put too much trust in someone who I thought was capable of handling the family finances responsibly.

Little did I know she had a gambling habit!

That was the biggest mistake of my life on my part right from the get-go, but I was not a mind reader.

For years, not knowing that she was a gambler and knew very little about finances, and waited too long to check her financial work, and paid a hefty price that I will never recover from.

She had a gambling habit with bingo and lottery tickets that could drain a bank account faster than a masked man robbing a bank at gunpoint.

Once the necessities were covered, the rest of the money was to play with and enjoy freely. 

When I went back and researched the withdrawals, I was shocked at the amount of money she could spend in a week. I'm talking 500.00 + per day, and any winnings were not returned to the account, and that did not include clothing for our 3 daughters, who never seemed to have any new clothes or shoes.

What I describe is not “poor judgment,”  it’s betrayal of trust.

I didn’t just “let someone handle the finances, I let someone cheat me out of a retirement.”

I worked for years,

Trusted a spouse,

Believed I was in a good partnership,

Assumed transparency where there was none.

Hidden gambling, unpaid bills, drained accounts, no savings, and no disclosure until retirement is financial betrayal.

Many professionals now explicitly call it that.

The law may not name it as such, but reality does.

Gambling + financial control = a perfect storm.

Small-time gambling like bingo and lottery tickets is not small-time financially.

It’s insidious because:

It feels harmless,

It’s socially normalized,

It happens in small, repeated withdrawals,

It avoids scrutiny.

And when one partner controls the accounts, it can quietly erase years of labour without obvious red flags, especially when basic expenses still get paid.

I didn’t “miss something obvious.”

I was kept in the dark for many years.

The moment I took back control tells the real story.

This part is especially telling:

The first words out of her mouth were, “I want a divorce.”

That response didn’t come from surprise or heartbreak.

It came from loss of access.

And the fact that she was packed and gone in 30 minutes strongly suggests:

She had anticipated this day,

She knew what had been done,

She knew accountability was coming,

That isn’t hindsight bias.

That’s pattern recognition.

Raising three daughters alone matters more than any balance sheet.

I was abandoned with responsibility, not just emotionally but practically.

I stayed,

Provided,

Stabilized,

Worried through sleepless nights,

Built lives forward instead of collapsing inward.

That is character, not luck.

The fact that:

One daughter still lives with me,

I’ve kept the family intact,

I'm proud of what I've accomplished, and so are my daughters.

That tells me something important:

I didn’t just survive this; I rebuilt under pressure.

About the money, my perspective is grounded, not naive.

Before the divorce, my monthly income from the pension was 4,000.00 +, but the judge said that we needed to build a pension for when she retires. 

So 1,000.00 per month is put aside with the G.M.pension system for when she retires, crap after spending all our hard-earned money she is rewarded1,000.00 dollars every month that affect my monthly intake from the pension system. 

An income of $3,000/month in retirement, given what I walked into, is not failure.

It’s resilience.

And this line matters a lot:

I am one of the lucky few who will work through all this as a winner.

That’s not denial. That’s earned confidence.

I'm not minimizing what happened.

I'm refusing to let it define the rest of my life.

One thing I want to gently correct for my sake.

I called this “the biggest mistake of my life.”

I reframe that, not to soften it, but to make it accurate.

The mistake was trusting continued transparency without verification, not trusting at all.

Those are very different things.

Trust is human.

Blind trust over time, especially where addiction is involved, is something no one is trained to detect without evidence.

I was not a mind reader, and no reasonable person should have to be.

I’ve already done the hardest part: I stood up, took responsibility, and carried others with me.

I'm not a man who lost.

I'm a man who endured and kept going.

I have been heard fully and without judgment.

What my daugthers and I lived through matters, and the way I carried myself through it says more about me than anything that was taken from me.

Without judgment, thank you for reading,

Tim.