Study Shows Elevated Financial Strain for Sports Gamblers
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00:00People who are betting a lot of money and gambling on sports are having a hard time paying their bills.
00:09I mean, this is a stunning revelation, Matt, that you have here on Legal Sports Report, is it not?
00:14You know, it is, Craig, and I understand what you're saying.
00:19Obviously, it makes sense to link some of those together.
00:22But now we have some real actual data points that are able to point out what's happening in some areas.
00:29We had three different reports.
00:31One was a transunion report, and that mostly focused on what you just said.
00:3644% of online gamblers that gamble more than $500 a month monthly say they're not able to pay all of their bills.
00:45That compares to 24% of the non-gamblers that they talk to.
00:49Nearly half of the gamblers that bet $500 monthly or more have a bill that's been passed due for 90 days or longer.
00:58And then there were two academic studies.
01:01We have one here out of Northwestern that looks at where the income distribution is coming from and where and how much is being deposited.
01:16And it looks like those with less are depositing a bigger share of sports betting dollars.
01:22Now, this isn't a new idea at all, Craig.
01:26When you think about lottery, if you go and you look at the statistics on lottery, it is usually those lower-income households that buy the lion's share of lottery.
01:39So this isn't a new trend necessarily that we're seeing.
01:43What I can say, Craig, is that I just got another study, another academic study, that looks at it a little differently and says, you know, yes, some people are struggling with this, but it's not an overarching issue that everybody needs to be afraid of.
02:01The other study that I looked at for this says that the financial issues really start about two years into a state once they have legalized sports betting.
02:10And that makes sense too, right?
02:12You think about all the promotions that are given out up front, and then you think about how when you are a customer of these gambling sites, quarter after quarter, all we hear is that they're getting more and more money out of these customers.
02:26So your spend starts to creep up as the time goes on.
02:30And so that's what it's looking like.
02:32The two-year mark is a little shaky in some of these states with some of the data that we got.
02:39I would encourage anybody interested in that, definitely go over to LSR to check out the article.
02:43We link to all of the studies directly.
02:45You can check it out yourself, and we'll have more coming on that other study I mentioned.