Gambling is Delaying Your Retirement
- Xa Hopkins
- Mar 31
- 5 min read
Before the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of legal online sports betting in 2018, Americans bet less than $5 billion in legal sports wagers annually. In 2025, American legal sports betting was up to just under $167 billion. The more-than-33-fold increase is fueled by double-digit (and triple–digit in a couple years) annual growth since 2018.
The legalization of online sports gambling makes fun wagers on the big game more accessible, but the proliferation of betting on absolutely anything to do with every sporting event has led to Americans finding an extra $162 billion to bet money on who will win the regular season D2 lacrosse game or what color the Gatorade will be after the NFL game. Americans are no longer just betting on winners of the big race or game. They are betting on everything, and the money for those extra bets is costing them their futures.
If that sounds a little extreme, a 2024 study examining the impact of sports betting on financially vulnerable households found that every “$1 of betting reduces net investment by $2.13.” This quick statistic shows us two insights:
Americans are using money that they would have invested to instead gamble on sporting events.
Gambling on sporting events leads Americans to reduce their investments by more than the amount they are betting.
A History of Sports Betting Since 2018
Sports betting was an entirely in-person activity limited to specific venues prior to the 2018 Supreme Court decision to eliminate the 1992 Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act, which previously barred most gambling around sports. Since 2018, 32 states and Washington, DC have legalized online sports betting. A total of 40 states allow some kind of sports betting, with some states requiring more traditional in-person bets.
We already know Americans spend more when it is easy. The expansion of apps that make it easier to transfer money, allow you to use an electronic credit card to make purchases, or “buy now” with just one click increases spending. The more difficult you make spending, the less you will spend. If you do not have Venmo, use your physical credit card, and do not save your credit card details on your favorite websites, you will spend less.
Online sports betting makes gambling easier because you can gamble from your couch, office, or metro on the way to work. Americans previously had to go to a specific location where legal sports betting could occur. Most of us do not have the time or energy to go somewhere to place bets multiple times a week. When we can place bets from our phones, betting is easier, and we bet more.
A lot more. About $162 billion more. And that is not all sports bettors are spending.
The Consumerism Surrounding Sports Betting
The fact that $1 of sports betting decreases net investments by $2.13 might seem confusing at first. The 2024 study suggests that “sports betting leads constrained households to use would-be savings and debt to reduce investments and increase spending on complements to gambling, likely leading to a lasting deterioration in their longer-term financial health.” Sports bettors are not just spending money on bets. They are also spending on “complementary goods such as cable, restaurants, and other entertainment.”
Think of this is gambling lifestyle inflation. At first, someone makes a bet on the big game that they already planned to watch with friends locally. That initial bet leads to more bets and becomes addictive. Now, that same person needs a nice TV, an NFL viewing package, and a comfortable chair to watch the game. For the game that is on a different streaming service, the sports bettor opts to go to the local bar, ordering wings and a beer while there, to see the results as soon as possible. The bets start costing more than the money placed because viewing the results early is important.
The addictive nature of sports betting sends bettors down this betting-lifestyle-inflation track. About 50–60% of individuals that place an initial bet come back to make another. The more bets a bettor has made, the more likely they will make more. Many sports gambling platforms know this and offer promotions such as $10 in bets free to attract new bettors to their platform and become addicted to betting. Once these bettors are on the betting platforms, they are likely to get stuck in the consumerist sports gambling cycle.
The Decline of Investments
Bettors’ money for sports bets and money for their sports betting lifestyle inflation mostly comes from money that would otherwise be invested. Sports bettors do not decrease other gambling, like online poker or lottery tickets. More speculative investments, like cryptocurrency, take a small hit as sports betting increases. But the biggest spending area of decline is investments like equities that lead to long-term wealth accumulation.
To make the financial outlook worse, houses that are more financially constrained spend a larger fraction of their income on sports bets than households with more financial flexibility. Sports betting participants are also “more than twice as likely as non-bettors to have ever invested in crypto or ever overdrawn their bank account, and four times more likely to have played online poker or purchased lottery tickets.” Sports bettors are taking on more risky financial behaviors and contributing less to safer, long-term wealth accumulation methods. Bettors spend an average of $179 on sports bets quarterly, leading to an average decline of $381 in investment contributions each quarter when gambling lifestyle inflation is factored into investments as well. Sports bettors are throwing away an average of $1,525 in long-term investments annually.
The Future Impact of Gambling
The average annual year-over-year increase in sports betting is more than 77%, allowing the industry to move from below $5 billion to nearly $167 billion from 2018 to 2025. While the year-over-year percentage increase has slowed, Americans continue to bet tens of billions of dollars more each year with no stagnation in sight. There are more bets available, more promotions to hook new bettors, and more states allowing online betting.
More recently, gambling is moving beyond sports. Prediction markets have stormed the gambling scene in the past two years, allowing bettors to bet on just about anything. Global prediction market volume in 2025 is estimated at $63.5 billion, a 400% increase over 2024. The rapid expansion of prediction markets left many observers to question whether prediction markets will steal some bettors from online sports gambling.
But the analysis on sports gambling showed that sports gamblers did not decrease their levels of betting in online card games or purchasing lottery tickets. The money to pay for their increase in gambling came from their long-term investments. If these sports bettors begin placing bets in prediction markets as well, the possibility that their behavior will stay consistent means they may take even more money from potential investments to instead bet on the stake of the day.
Many questions remain on the ethics of prediction markets, which recently allowed bettors to stake bets on the possibility of war between the U.S. and Iran and targets in said war, but that has not yet stopped global bettors from participating. In 2018, the U.S. Supreme Court made it much easier for Americans to gamble from absolutely anywhere. From 2018 to 2025, that gambling mostly centered around sporting events, but the volume of bets grew substantially. Since 2024, we have entered a new lawless betting environment where bettors may bet on life-altering global events.
These bets have the potential to change the geopolitical landscape if left unregulated. Even with regulation, we are looking at the real possibility of a generation of bettors with absolutely no retirement investments to support themselves due to years of gambling from their phones. None of us can predict the future, but the future will be bleaker for those bettors attempting to predict it from their phones at the expense of their 401(k).
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