Stay Safe Online: Keep Track Of Your Budget And Time

Online gambling is a tricky beast. On the one hand, it can be great fun and an interesting way to spend your time. On the other hand, it can get out of control if you lose the run of yourself. It’s very important to stay safe and play smart. And that’s why we think you should always employ responsible gambling tools while you place bets on sports, play poker or frequent an online casino.

Keep an eye on your time

We know it sounds like a cliche, but your time is precious. You’ve got to make sure that you’re spending enough time doing the things that matter to you. Hanging out with friends and family, looking after yourself, getting outside for walks and exercise and all that good stuff.

Sometimes when people are online gambling, time can get away from and they might end up spending more time than they’d like on the sites. So make sure that doesn’t happen to you.

The first thing you should do is set time limits for your gambling. Figure out how much time you can spare gambling per session. Then it can be easier to stick to it if you set a reality check reminder on your gambling action. You can often do this via your gambling site of choice, so you don’t even need to remember to do it.

Decide how often you want to see the alerts, turn them on and you’ll instantly see them. However, if you decide you want to see them less often or remove them entirely, you’ll have to wait 24 hours before those changes take effect.

Just remember that although sports betting and online casino is often included in these reality checks, sometimes poker isn’t.

Keep an eye on your budget

As much as time, it’s so important to keep an eye on how much you’re spending on online gambling. And that can be easier said than done, between money deposited, money lost and wins.

So do yourself a favour and take a look at your online gambling site’s activity tracker. Then you can quickly and easily see your current balance, win/loss history, transactions, bet times and net deposits. You can select a particular period, so you can view them over a year, a month or take a closer look at your activity in the past week.

That kind of overview is invaluable and can give you an idea of how much you’re comfortable in budgeting for online gambling.

Speaking of budgeting, some sites have budget calculators where you can factor in life expenses to see how much expendable income you have. Once you know that, you can decide on what proportion of that you’re comfortable with using for gambling and potentially losing. Remember, going smaller is always better than going bigger. The most important thing is that you don’t have any regrets. And trust us, being a bit more conservative in your gambling will always pay off in the long run.

And once you figure out what kind of money you want to play with, put your money where you mouth is and set a deposit limit. You can set one for anywhere from a 24-hour to 30-day period and adjust the limits downwards whenever you want. But if you want to increase your limits, it’ll take 24 hours for the changes to take effect, much like with the time limits.

What sites have responsible gambling tools?

The truth is that most good online gambling sites have a robust set of tools that you can use for more responsible gambling. So before you sign up to any site, make sure you take a look at what they provide to their players. If they don’t have a good selection of responsible gambling tools, we don’t recommend you sign up. It could be a sign that they don’t take other aspects of online gambling seriously either. But for your information, all of the responsible gambling tools we’ve highlighted here are also available at bet365.