More Awesome Than You!

My mom and dad sims seem to die before the kids come back from college and the money they've earned goes *poof* into the nothingness of simland, leaving the kidlets with whatever they'd earned at college.

Is this broken, or do I need to request a hack for automatic inheritance? 

Thanks!!

This is standard behavior, if a household disintegrates, the Government claims the estate. There dosen't appear to be any actual inheritance in the game. Otherwise we could start assessing inheritance taxes on it. :P

As for why your sims are dying before the kids can return from college, I sincerely hope you're not trying to play it as 1 normal day : 1 uni day, that's a bad ratio.

Students do seem to actually gain the money earned from inheritances after the death of a relative - even if they are in college.  I usually use a place holder sim if the parents are going to die before the kids return from college - as sucky as it is, there's no other option.

Bleh, crappy.  And no, JM, I'm not playing it like that ;) I just apparently have bad luck with old people.

One work-around is to get Monique's enhanced computers over on MTS2.  One of their functions is 'online banking', so the parents could setup accounts for the kids and give away most of their cash before they go to the great bit bucket in the sky.  It stays in the 'bank' (and even draws interest) until the kids pull it out.

Another work-around is to use Pescado's 'Money Order' found here to send money to the kids via mail.  In this case, though, you'd have to make sure the kids spend the money on big ticket items and stick those items in their inventory before they graduate, or they'd lose the money they got (also true for insurance payments -- in fact, any money earned at college). I usually use the inventory so a college grad could spend the rest of their grants before leaving to buy some basic stuff to stock their house when they get back to the main hood.

If you have "No 20K Handouts", the money is not lost: A portion of it equal to 1/N, where N is the number of residents presently on the lot, is taken and used as your starting "out of college" money, instead of the free 20K handout. This even division of the funds based on this proportion may or may not be what you wish, but you can just money-order the funds from there if you have remaining residents. If you don't have remaining residents, well, 1/1 is all of it.

If that doesn't turn out to be enough to buy a house, well, TOO FRIKKEN BAD. You think everyone is entitled to a house? Hell, no. People who can't afford housing wind up sleeping in the STREETS. That, or moving in with someone else.

I just get the last one returning from college to send all the surplus money back to the others and stick all the expensive objects in their inventory.  But my parents are so chock full of elixir they usually are the same age as the returning graduates! (And if the kids move into their own lot, I have to remember to turn aging off or they end up older than their parents!)

With no 20k handouts installed, my poor grads only have a good 5k-9k to buy a house. Its good to make them struggle a bit. ;)

True, but if you move another one in they get more money anyway.  And they do need a computer or they're stuck with the jobs in the paper, and it can take forever for their LTW career to show up!

And two of mine have businesses anyway, so they just need to go to the business once and they can start raking in the cash.  (Though why they have to do that just beats me!)

I go back and forth with it, depending on whether I feel like being a benevolent 'god' or not. :)  Most of the time I have it disabled, but every so often I have a bunch of grads that I know are just going to move back home, so I enable it to keep them from adding to much to the family funds.

I've never used it, can you enable/disable it within game, or do you have to close the game first?

You have to close the game, and use clean installer to toggle it.

Oh, well, in that case, I won't bother, I get sick of having to close the game as it is!

You don't have to close the game and enable it every time.  You just have to enable it the first time.

After that, it's just there.

Coming out of college, my sims are poor as dirt! Where are you guys getting all the money? Even with straight A's that's only 4800 plus whatever they got in scholorships. ~hmm...I suspect my sims are making all the wrong choices in life. lol  :-\

Well, my main dorm has 8 residents and currently I think they have around a quarter of a million Simoleans.  That's because of the SS bug - about 5 of them have just been initiated and each time they've brought back all this money.  Then there is the Jacquet woman, who married an old Chinese guy who was about to pop his clogs (which he did tonight).  When he moved in he brought about $8m with him, which was odd considering the family he came from were extremely poor immigrants all cramped into a tiny 2-bedroomed house (6 of them when he moved out).

I think this is a bit off-topic, actually.  Never mind, it's late and I'm old. 

Some people are lamers and give their sims free 20K handouts. Because they suck. If your sims are poor as dirt, that's the way they SHOULD be!

A perfect GPA will get you 9600 simoleons, 1200 per semester.  Plus scholarships, usually my Sims make over 10K on their own.  But my Sim kids are all rich brats and I have their parents send them money and then they get the 20K when they leave and often move in together.  They usually blow all of their scholarship and grant money on juice, clothes, bongs and dates.

Frankly, I find the 20K handout more realistic than not.  A college degree will get you far in life...

The catch with the 20K free handouts is that it basically makes bothering to earn any money at all pointless, since you automatically get 20K free. Plus there's that entire "Only Broke Until Someone Moves Out" issue.

I'd disagree with the idea that a college degree gets you a free lunch.  Here in the UK, since the grant system was abolished, it's been getting harder and harder for students.  Now, evidently, they are nearly 40 before they finish paying off their loans and start to accumulate more wealth than those who finished school with A-Level and went straight into a job.  (Unlike the US, our college system doesn't include providing on-campus employment for students, nor is there much in the way of industry or commerce-funded scholarships.  There was no tradition for such a system, and our government in its infinite wisdom destroyed the old grants system, but could not legislate to put what you have in the States in its place.

Since, as people keep saying, Sims is not RL, does it really matter whether one prefers them to leave college with nothing, or rich as Croesus?

When I finished college in RL I was completely broke, I had to debate moving back in with my parents. Fortunately, I found a moderately paying job in a field that had absolutely nothing to do with my degree. ::)

My sims usually go  to college alone because I don't have large families and the children usually have a huge gap between them. I only send others if there is some kind of arranged marriage going on. I hate playing uni so I don't do the SS or greek houses. And above all, they barely ever get perfect marks because all of my sims are just a tad bit LAZY! That's why they come back to the neighborhood with nothing.

I think the main difference here is that in RL the cost of day-to-day LIVING is much higher than in The Sims!  And Sims can come back from college with very little cash, but an inventory filled with more than enough to start out with!  If you had taken the furniture from a rented house, other than what you had bought yourself, you'd have been liable to be arrested - sims can get away with taking everything including the kitchen sink!

Oh I don't know about cost of living being less - it's just that they usually make so much more than most people (OK, me).

I totally forgot about my moreexpensiveNPC's hack and I recently sent my new Legacy founder off to work after giving birth, hired a nanny (who had custom black hair weirdly enough and immediately started relaxing naked on the Love Bed!  :'(), and when she got back she had made §588 or so that day, and her nanny cost her §850 almost!

My sims wouldn't hire a nanny if you paid THEM!

Well, I decided to go a different way with this Legacy, and she's a single mom.  If she wants to work (and she has to, considering she's still living on the lawn), then she has no choice.  Although obviously I am going to have her take her vacation days now.  :P

Well, as soon as she has the money for an easel, get her painting!  (I have a sim who started out as family, and he switched to Popularity at college, but he STILL constantly rerolls the Create a Masterpiece want, and almost always gets between 6-700 simoleons for his effort, and I don't have to waste time getting him to kick anything, his fun is always up!)

If you were playing with hacked stuff, you could use Monique's computer and get her writing short stories....

See, that's much more realistic now. As it stands, it's all but impossible NOT to make a profit on the most menial incomes.

You could cheat and move a boyfriend in with her for a day, and then he could move out again - that way she'd get whatever he brought with him, and he'd only get a precentage back.  Even with no20K handouts, if she did that a few times, she wouldn't need to work, so no need for an expensive nanny!  (The nanny was always the most overpriced anyway, and the most useless!)

This is my Legacy challenge, and so cheating is a little against the point.  It's supposed to be hard for her - there are plenty of generations to come that won't have any problem whatsoever financially.

Well, is it cheating exactly if her romance boyfriend keeps being asked to move in, then decides he doesn't want to stay?  If you have no 20K handouts, he's not going to bring much with him, just enough to keep her and the kid going until he starts school and she can take a job - of course, it would have to be 9-3 until he's a teen, so no skilling in the relevant areas!

Oh, and you want it hard?  then how about each time he pops back into her life, he leaves her in the pudding club?

Normal Legacy rules say that you can't let anyone who has already moved out of the house once move back in later. Of course, that's intended to prevent them from bringing the 20k with them repeatedly, but it's still breaking the same rule for the same reason.

Oh, well, I don't play challenges, so I'm afraid I don't know the rules.  Never mind, he can move in once (which is allowed, I believe) stay just long enough, then move out!  (Leaving her in the identical situation, of course!)

Have you had a chance to update your Legacy story yet, BlueSoup? I checked your page but didn't see anything new. So uh, I guess that's probably my answer. ;D
Anyway, just wanted to let you know I'm looking forward to it when you do.

No, not yet.

But today is my last day of work before 9 blissful days of no work, so I'm sure I'll get a good update in there somewhere.  :)

I can certainly echo what Zephyr said with regard to the UK system.  My eldest son lasted all of two weeks at Uni the first time he went, because he simply couldn't afford to live.  The old system had its flaws, but the new one isn't exactly a great improvement.  In many ways, it's better for them to wait and go in as mature students, which isn't the way it should be.

Added to which, Ancient, the old system was not as expensive to the state as the government like to make out.  Only students from poorer homes got full grants, the majority got partial grants or no grants at all - but parents were informed of the amount they should contribute (and for which they could claim tax relief).  The main problem with the system was there was no way built in of ensuring that parents did, in fact, pay the money they were claiming to have paid!  (And since the vast majority of members of the government were probably in the parental contribution category, that may be why they didn't like the system!)

When I was teaching, I used to advise the parents of 7-year-olds to take out endowment polices for their kids, so they'd have something to begin college with!