Financial Lessons from The Sims 4
By: Cassy Kissack
Tags: Gaming, Personal Finance, Money, Life Lessons, Work

9–5 jobs can have their own unique perks

At this time our sims might not need health insurance, but other than the obvious paycheck, careers do come with their own specific benefits. Whether it’s mood-boosting clutter to fill their homes with or the perfect easel for our talented artist.

All your needs other than sleep and hygiene can also be refilled while on company time, though it’s not an ideal use of your time if you want to fast track your promotion.

While in the real world I’m more partial to self-employment, I do occasionally miss some of the perks I’ve had at various jobs over the years, which have ranged from some weird ones like free peanut butter sandwiches and Coke products in the staff lounge to more traditional ones like discounts on product and retirement fund matching.

If you happen to stumble upon a part-time gig with great employee perks, it might be worthwhile to work the shift or two a week depending on your current employment situation.

If you want to earn more, you need to skill up

Raising your skills in order to be successful is a central but underlying theme across The Sims franchise. It doesn’t matter what goal you're pursuing in-game, raising the related skills is the best way to get there.

Want a promotion? Raise the skills related to your career.

Want to convince Nancy Landgrabb to let you move into her mansion? Get that charisma skill up so you can sweet talk her until she agrees.

Want to write a bestselling novel and earn a ton of royalties while you sit in your hot tub? Time to practice and raise your writing skill.

You can almost always find a way to get paid to raise your skills

Whether it’s painting or writing, just because your skill is low in The Sims universe, it doesn’t mean you can’t profit off the final product of your work. Go right ahead and sell that book anyway, but expect that you’ll be earning a couple of bucks a day self-publishing as opposed to a few hundred daily from bestseller submitted to a literary digest.

This one is a pretty simple translation into putting your content out there in real life, though I will note this is where a pen-name comes in handy.

I’ve published several books using Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing over the last few years, and I’ll just say that the content is not something I really want to appear if someone happens to Google me. But it earns me a nice little chunk of income that goes directly into my retirement fund.

Certain careers also offer an option to build the associated skill while you’re at work. Take that job in Tech Support, learn to program while you’re there, profit, and quit when you’re financially stable enough to do it on your own.

Getting paid to learn might be a bit more challenging depending on your industry in real life, but apprenticeships or internships can be incredibly useful when you want to reach your long term goals without heading back to school.

Building “passive” income requires time and skills, or money.

Within The Sims 4 we have a few options for gaining money passively. We can write books, license songs, create apps, or fulfill a life goal to simply earn a ton of money and then get a weekly deposit based on our household funds.

Passive income has become an unfortunate confusing topic these days because too many people seem to be missing the simplest version of the formula to get there

Time + Money = More Money or Time + Skills = Money

If you want to see money appear while you sit on the couch binge-watching Tiger King, those are the only two ways to go about it. It might take some out of the box thinking to figure out how to monetize your existing skills, or you might need to learn some new ones. Some skills are more useful than others.

Unfortunately, real-life doesn’t come with a tree that drops bags of money. Until then, I’ll be collecting my Simoleans but regularly contributing to my investment portfolio.