How to Budget for Online Bingo

Online bingo is meant to be an enjoyable and fun experience. But because you are also staking a wager and playing for real cash prizes, fun can turn into an excessive behaviour when you’re primary goal changes from having fun to chasing a specific prize. This is when most players find themselves in trouble with over depositing.

Given most of us who play bingo online have families and other responsibilities such as pay bills, grocery, rent, emergencies, travel and entertainment; it’s always in our best interest to ensure we know how much we can use towards bingo games on a monthly bases and be responsible not to go over the limit we’ve set for ourselves.

Here are Four tips that can help you budget for Online Bingo

1. Look for Sites that help you setup monthly limits
2. Simplify your monthly Budget
3. Dump those Credit Cards
4. Play Smart

Play at Bingo Sits that Have Monthly Deposit Limits

Luckily, there are several leading UK bingo websites today that help their members establish daily / weekly limits as soon as they’ve opened their account. This prevents players to exceed their deposit limit for a set period.

An example of a site that does this well is Gala Bingo. As one of the leading bingo operators, Gala Bingo helps protect their members from excessing gambling behaviour with the a daily / weekly limit feature. Basically, this feature enables players to limit the amount of money that they are able to deposit into their account on a daily and/or a weekly period.

Simplify Your Monthly Budget

There are many ways to setup your budget. If you don’t have a budget yet, it’s probably because budgets seem complicated to you or intimating. I’ve tried many different budgeting systems, including complicated budgeting softwares which only make the process more stressful than needed. The solution that has worked for me is the simple 60% budgeting solution.

In a nutshell, the 60 percent budgeting solution works like this:

• 60% of your budget is Monthly expenses such as mortgage/rent, food, utilities and transportation card / transit. This is the bulk of where your monthly salary gets allocated to
• 10% for Retirement – it’s recommended that 10% of your salary gets invested into your retirement plan
• 10% for Long-term Savings / Debt repayment: the simply budget suggests, 10% of your salary should go towards long term saving plans such as mutual fonds or stocks. However, if you have a bit of debt, it’s advised you use the 10% to reduce your outstanding debt
• 10% short terms savings – We all have those unexpected expenses that creap around when we least expect them, such as home maintenance, appliances, medical and gifts. Putting away 10% of your salary aside for these moments can certainly help reduce the burden
• 10% Guilt Free Fun Money – This is the money you can spend on having fun such as going out with friends, movies and yes, play online bingo

Dump Those Credit Cards

Credit cards bring short term convenience with long term headache and if you use your credit cards for online bingo deposits, please limit your play on one card or better yet dump all your credit cards and use alternative payments like Ukash or Paypal. There are many bingo sites that accept Paypal today.

Using alternative deposit methods can help prevent you from over depositing and keep you far away from debt.

Play Smart

How many bingo sites do you play on? In my experience playing on too many bingo sites can also be hurtful for your bottom line as you can easily lose track of your total deposits. To play smart means, limit yourself to a max of 3 bingo sites at a time. Preferably it’s best to play on fewer bingo site as possible, but if you do enjoy playing on multiple bingo sites, try to keep it to a max of three websites.

If you do decide to play on multiple bingo sites, then we recommend you plan out your deposits to ensure maximum play time:

1. Look for bingo sites that offer you on going reload bonuses on your deposits. This tends to be more common with new bingo sites.
2. Some sites like the Joy bingo sites offer you weekend extra bonuses. Check the Bingo Hideout Bingo Bonus Booster page for a comparison on leading bingo sites and their bonus offers.
3. Look for sites that offer pay to play members free bingo games as well as penny card priced games.
4. Participate in chat games as you can also unlock bonuses for simply participating which then help further extend your playtime

There you have it, four simple tips that can help you better budget for online bingo and ensure you never get into trouble with over depositing at your favourite bingo site.

Paul Marion is the community manager of the UK bingo site Bingo HQ where he shares tips and suggestions to further improve bingo player’s experience playing bingo.