I gambled (stocks) my savings away right before losing my job and am anxious ashamed and scared.
I’m a 26 y/o (m) and I had a rough year where everything seemed to go wrong. Things got stolen, illness in the family and bad but not the worst is probably my contract ending at work.
Now I had some good money saved up after working hard for a while, nothing substantial but it did make me proud somehow and it gave me a real sense of safety and security.
But it didn’t give me enough of a secure feel in the sense that I could bridge a gap between jobs so I made the biggest mistake of my life and put more into the stock market as friends had been doing well and I had in the past too.
Well it all obviously went to s-t. In the most traumatizing way. I’d add a couple hundred bucks every few days to a losing position just to survive the swing.
My friends birthdays neared and I canceled it because I was laying in bed after looking at my bank account, utterly drained in a greed filled frenzy of about 1-2 months.
Every bad thing in my life came together and led up to that critical point of self-destruct. Thinking I deserved to win. I’d already been down in all other aspects in life, surely this had to be a winner. What a self-centered way to think.
In hindsight it was kind of just doomed to begin with. I really did feel important behind my computer watching my money burn lol, maybe that’s what kept me going too long.
I’m now about a month away from that worst point. I have some sense of safety but my pride is gone, basically my savings are gone, I lost a job I once loved and honestly, I’ve just been in a pretty emotionless state this past week.
I’m not going to be doing this again, after serious consideration of what that means for the future but I just don’t trust myself enough to even try. But where do I go from here? I feel frozen.
I know there’s nothing to really reply to something like this where the mistakes are obvious and I created the whole issue but maybe someone will recognize themselves and not feel alone. Thanks.