Money Order request

[Inge]

Pescado dear, xxx,

Would it be possible, please, for you to change your money order slightly so it no longer automatically regurgitates everyone's saved money orders into the family's funds just because you bought one to send to someone?   Perhaps have a menu option on it to do that, rather than automatic?

[Sagana]

SimsWardrobe's checks (which are very similar to Pescado's money orders) have a "cash" action. The checks end up in the receiving sims inventory and they don't get the money until they choose to cash them. That's handy. You can receive more than one check and just cash them one at a time too.

I like the way the money orders are mailed and that they don't have to have a desk and chair to use one (or turn move objects on) and sometimes the less complicated amount menus, so I use both.

[Inge]

The thing is I am using Pescado's Money orders as part of my owned lots system to send the proceeds from  the lot to the lot owners remotely, and had been intending to use them more widely for all sorts of things (such as changing the employment income so it goes to the individual who earned it rather than the family - then a daily rent or housekeeping contribution can be automatically paid into the household funds).  Ideally, this money would remain the owners' own personal money unless they wished to share it with their family.

Also, these are used to indicate to the no20k handout hack that the movers-out are to have a certain amount of money when they move out.  Surely if you have one of the money orders on the lot to use as a cashing-in device, no sooner had the sim made out an order for himself than it would be simply cashed out again.

I certainly could switch to using the cheques, or I could design my own money tokens, but I thought ideally there would just be one single personal wealth system that we could all hook into with various hacks.

Maybe it would be easier to design my own.   I believe there is an inbuilt personal wealth token anyway - not been able to trace where it is used though.

[ingeli]

I have always ben annoyed about how the game handles "inherited" money - the insurance money just adding to household and so on. A better way would be for sims indivudually actually getting the money, and maybe it would be counted on how much money the sim ACTUALLY have when he dies.

[Sagana]

I also would love separate accounts for all sims, but I have to say I'm awfully glad the amount of insurance payoff my kids get if I die isn't based on the amount of money I actually have Yes I do tend to spend all my money as soon as I get it.

[HomeschooledByTards]

Maybe it would be easier to design my own.   I believe there is an inbuilt personal wealth token anyway - not been able to trace where it is used though.

Would it be related to how the game keeps track of how much money a sim has earned from work? Lord Darcy has posted Squinge's date counter which includes a check wealth feature. Check wealth only counts how much a sim has earned from work, not from selling craftables (at least not through an owned business).

[Inge]

Oh I see... better not mess with that one then

[Jelenedra]

FYI, if you sell craftables/unburied treasures via BRY, it counts towards that sims' earned income.

[Gastfyr]

FYI, if you sell craftables/unburied treasures via BRY, it counts towards that sims' earned income.

What is BRY?

[Zazazu]

Business Runs You.

[J. M. Pescado]

The concept of "individual" funds doesn't really exist in TS2 and trying to shoehorn one in would simply be an immense pain in the neck. Individual sims cannot have "personal money" without rendering it unusable. If you REALLY wanted to give sims "personal" funds that stay unusable in such a manner, might I suggest simply 0x2A'ing one of the "Cash Sack" objects that already exists in the game, setting the Object Value, and stuffing it into the owner's inventory, so he has a cash sack that he can delete out of his inventory to liquidate the funds? Not only would this serve to accomplish your purpose, but it would also be visually representative.

[Inge]

I don't really agree about how painful and unusable personal money is.  It can be assessed, added to and taken from by any hack the hacker wishes to make do so (like me with your money orders - my object has an interaction to see what value of them the sim has, like a statement, and to cash the whole family's or just his own - to his own family funds even if he is selectable in someone else's house).

The idea is that just like with human personal wealth the money can voluntarily or by standing order be transferred into household funds to pay bills etc.   This typically happens when a husband and wife have seperate bank accounts for their personal earnings, and have agreed to contribute to the household account a certain amount each per period.   And so a controller object is set up to automatically deduct a specified amount per sim as the player wishes.

[J. M. Pescado]

Brain hurts now. You people are weird.

[Jelenedra]

In my experience, couples that keep seperate accounts are more likely to bounce checks because they always forget how got money last. Or they pull out the wrong debit card at the register.

The flip side of this are couples that share accounts and both have debit cards. There is always someone in the relationship that will go and... buy gas and forget to tell someone. Someone always forgets to hand over receipts to the book keeper...

Thankfully, in my case, The Husband knew he'd forget and doesn't have a debit card.

[Inge]

Though with Sims, there will be a friendly Controller Object looking after their accounts

[Zazazu]

In my experience, couples that keep seperate accounts are more likely to bounce checks because they always forget how got money last. Or they pull out the wrong debit card at the register.

The flip side of this are couples that share accounts and both have debit cards. There is always someone in the relationship that will go and... buy gas and forget to tell someone. Someone always forgets to hand over receipts to the book keeper...

Thankfully, in my case, The Husband knew he'd forget and doesn't have a debit card.

My parents have four accounts in between them. Shared checking/saving, and personal checking x2. It works. They each put a percentage of their pay into the shared checking account which is used to pay all bills, put in shared investments, and for groceries. Anything at the end of the month over their cushion goes into savings. Then they have their individual checking money to play with. They each have their own cars (suburbs of a barely-city) so gas share isn't an issue.

Sometimes either of them will move some of their extra personal money into the shared account so they can overpay things like the mortgage, but that's all voluntary.

[Jelenedra]

That's an example of doing it right. Unfortunately, most people don't do that.

The way ours is that my checking and savings turned into OUR checking and savings and my husband uses cash he gets from work on groceries, gas, and fun money for the both of us. Having my (our) checking responsible for paying the bills keeps my implusive shopping side in check. The checking gets used on things like bills and clothes.

[jolrei]

We each have our own personal account, and there is a household account/line of credit, which is used for the house, electricity, taxes, water, heat, etc.  This way we set aside enough for our expenses at the outset, and after that I don't touch my wife's account and she does not use mine (both accounts are joint, in case of emergencies).  Both of us are a bit OCD about keeping track of budgets, mainly so that once a month we can have a famous argument about whose system is better (the challenge is to try to say something this month that you didn't say every time in the previous 6 months - harder than you might think).

I recommend this system, for the lulz. 

[Inge]

Ok I am going to make personal bank accounts, and make them able to transfer money to and from most of the other known hacked finance systems.

[J. M. Pescado]

Our system is that we have a room in which the funds are kept. We refer to this as the Vault. It functions as a sort of black hole. Shinies check in, they don't check out. What goes in the vault, stays in the vault. Thus it becomes filled with shiny treasures and we like to roll around in it. Anyone trying to TAKE the treasures is set on fire.

[Jelenedra]

J.M. Pescado: The Gothic Scrooge McDuck.

[HomeschooledByTards]

My parents have four accounts in between them. Shared checking/saving, and personal checking x2. It works. They each put a percentage of their pay into the shared checking account which is used to pay all bills, put in shared investments, and for groceries. Anything at the end of the month over their cushion goes into savings. Then they have their individual checking money to play with. They each have their own cars (suburbs of a barely-city) so gas share isn't an issue.

That's a lot like what we do. We have five accounts, four checking and one savings. We put both paychecks into our main account, we each have an account for our fun money, and an account for "entertainment". Fun money, savings and entertainment funds are transferred automatically. We each have a debit card for our fun money accounts, and my husband has one for entertainment (I haven't had time to go by the bank and request one for myself). Daily expenses such as groceries and gas go on our credit cards, the idea is to pay off the credit cards at the end of each month.

We're paying off one of our cards every month, and making slow but sure inroads on the other lines of credit we have. Someday we will be debt free, and will pay off our cards every month. We both lost our jobs just before (Mr. Jesslla) and just after (me) we got married. I couldn't find a job for over a year, and then I went back to school for three years so we've racked up QUITE a bit of credit card debt during our marriage.

We both work ~35 miles away from home, but our schedules vary by quite a bit so we both have our own cars.

[J. M. Pescado]

See, that is the picture of total financial irresponsibility. How I budget things is simple: First, I get a cost estimate for it. Then, I get a cost estimate on the contingency plan for when that doesn't work. Then, I get a cost estimate on the contingency plan for the contingency plan. Then, I get a cost estimate on the contingency plan for the contingency plan. Once I am satisfied that the chance that I will run out of contingency plans has become astronomically unlikely, I sum up the total cost estimates of everything involved, then double it. These funds are then set aside for the plan. Any surplus funds left over after execution to into the vault. As previously mentioned, this money is never seen by light of day again.

[Jelenedra]

We have exactly three lines of credit. Our credit card, our car, and the Unsecured loan we got to pay off our credit cards.

Credit card has $300 left on it and the Unsecured loan has about $600 left on it. I expect that we will have that paid off by next month. After that, the monthly payment for that will go into a savings for our house. We don't have much of a nest egg right now because we've been shoving all of our free money into the unsecured loan. So we'll go from about $300/500 to $550/750 a month that is not ear marked for bills.

[J. M. Pescado]

Have you considered that rather than waiting, you should simply suspend all spending and pay off everything now? And after that's done, since you'll be used to operating under the condition of having spendings suspended, just leave it that way. Once I slash an expense, it tends to stay slashed even after the budget crisis that prompted the slashing has passed, because by the time that's over, I'm just used to it that way and start to wonder why I ever bothered wasting money on that. And hey, more precious, shiny gold to roll around in!