The line “just one more, I promise, it will be the last time” together with the scene of a precocious little girl handing her piggy bank over to her problem gambler father delivered much impact to many Singaporeans. This year, the NCPG has followed up with their new campaign: Know the Line, with the tagline “and take control” is featured on MRT stations, billboards and the internet.

“I don’t gamble.”, you may say. But gambling is more than just queuing up at the local NTUC supermarket to shade in those four digits, or throwing chips around at poker games. It is about taking risks. In the book “Why do smart people do stupid things with money”, the author describes gambling as a financial dysfunction characterized by people who take high risks with money, and have little or low inclinations to save.

Even if you do not gamble (as in make bets, or play the stock market – a controversial definition of gambling, by the way), we are taking risks in our every day decisions. Every single dollar spent is a risk we agree to undertake. Even the $1 paid for coffee is a risk – will this $1 be able to give me the caffeine jolt I need to finish my report? Or will it be ineffective and I will need another cup of teh ping(iced milk tea)? Or worse, will it give me food poisoning and incur greater medical treatment costs instead? The point here is that, we all really do need to know the line, and know how much risk is healthy before it is dangerous. And to question Isla Fisher in Confessions of a Shopaholic, will that new scarf REALLY be an investment?

The next part of the campaign is that problem gambling hurts the whole family. This is definitely true! Uneducated, unplanned or simply reckless spending with low savings and high risks is dangerous. For mild cases, this would probably translate into the breadwinner not being able to afford that family holiday to Japan. But in the extreme, medication that cannot be bought, family arguments or even divorces over money issues. It is common knowledge that money is the root of all evil, and problem gambling is really like problem overspending, where your expenditures take control of you, where you continue swiping your credit cards despite knowing the towering stack of bills at home.

So, think about your finances today. Are you a gambler? Or worse, are you a problem gambler?

-stella