More Awesome Than You!

Pescado, is it possible to reduce the initial start cash from 20,000 to a lower figure - 15,000 or 10,000.
Enough to build a half decent place but without the luxuries?

Maybe, but I'm not looking terribly hard. I don't create terribly many sims anymore, and $20K isn't really enough to create a "luxury" place anyway. With less money, you're not really losing anything except some walls, which are strictly speaking more of a luxury than a necessity. As it stands, you're usually already shaving luxuries like, say, back and side walls, as well as paint and flooring.

So the housing wouldn't really get less functional unless you reduced them to extreme poverty, like the below 5K line, they'd just get uglier.

Easiest way is to move them into a Maxis house, leave them for 24 hours, then move them out - the value of everything will have dropped and they will move out with less cash than when they moved in!

I thought the easiest way was to send money to a townie.

If they're new sims, would they know a townie to send it to - from the families bin?  (Plus you need to have the hack installed.)

No, but I'm sure one will greet you shortly. And why WOULDN'T you have the object installed? It's actually a self-contained object, and not really a hack at all.

Getting less than 20K seems illogical.  I mean, 20K barely pays for a (small) starting house anyway, so with less than that, the only thing you're going to be able to buy is a small plot of land or a decommissioned military bunker in Montana.

There is also a way to do it in SimPe, but you would have to exit the game first. Simply go into SimBrowser, click the Family Instance link and take their money away. I don't know whether you have to plop them on a lot or if you can do that when they are still in the bin. I've always just plopped them onto a lot first if I had to exit and go into SimPe for any reason.

G.

Well, starting with less than that means that you don't get a house of any kind: You get a collection of lawn furniture, since obviously, you need the furniture more than you need the luxury of walls.

From my point of view, 10000 is more than adequate to acquire everything that is needed on day one. (That does include building walls etc which are hardly needed) PLUS, if two sims get together currently, they get the added benefit of another 20000 (or so). - hardly the scenario for a young married couple needing to make their way. In fact they hardly need to work. Ever!
  This, when compared with their offspring using the no 20k handout mod (my favourite hack), is too generous. I believe a significant reduction compliments that hack.

Am I convincing you?   



 

Well, technically, they hardly need to work ever because when you have no possessions, you also don't have any bills to speak of.

Would you be happier if they started with zilch? Not a single penny beyond the $2600 you need for a piece of dirt so that you can even exist?

Alternatively, you could try bringing them up as College CASites. That should ensure that they begin with a puny $500 to their wallet, live in the dorms for their college careers, and finally move out of the dorm penniless and destitute in some random amount, sorta like real college students....except as CASites, they have no parents to move back with!

No, I would just like to see less initial cash.

Financial constraints balanced against aspirational needs probably summarises it.
Changing child care, maid service costs etc. and revamping wages, work hours and skill requirements is within my ability and clearly trivial for you  - but since I can't change aspirations, this is the other option.   

I have every reason to believe that the raw-starting-cash is partially hardcoded.

Well, child care doesn't cost anything. Child ABUSE costs a token amount of cash, but actual care doesn't cost anything. Besides, anyone who's lived the E-Mail Challenge knows that you need surprisingly little. And I don't suppose you need maid service, no matter how much or how little it costs, if you can't afford anything to clean in the first place. That's really the thing with your goal: If you want to send your sims into abject poverty, you CAN, but then they may actually like it and won't have any expenses, and you'll lose the entire "struggle" again since without expenses, they don't have to worry about much.

The struggle is for them to have relative success in their lives, not for every single one of them to get A+ grades, perfect college marks and reach the top of their career and thats with my 9 year old daughter playing.

Behind that dry wit, your point is profound.                                                           

Actually, what would be really cool is to start them out at $0 and everything they buy puts them into debt (with interest payments, of course).

The loan idea is quite interesting. Ofcourse, only with the appropriate interest charges.

G.

You used to be able to do that in SimCity - start the game with a bond which you had to pay off.

I've got around the 'initial 20K' thing somewhat by populating a town with mostly college graduates.  It does take a heckuva lot of time to put those students through their paces, but the lack of freebies does make things a little more challenging.

To give the poorest of the poor graduates somewhere to hang their hat, I've created an apartment block in the main neighbourhood, since there aren't any parents to go back to yet.

Thank you. Now those sims will have to be a touch more frugal.