I've looked through the forum to see if anyone's asked this but haven't been able to find an answer anywhere, so here goes.

I got Ambitions last week and finally got my first Twinbrook resident (a firefighter) to the elder stage. She was at the top of the career track and retired, and is now receiving a pension of more than $7000 a day! I don't like this at all because having so much money takes away the challenge of the game.

Is there a patch to fix this? Does anyone know if this problem is unique to the firefighter profession? If so it doesn't really matter because I'm unlikely to play that profession twice.

Failing that, if an elder just chooses to quit their job (as opposed to retiring) does that mean they won't get a pension? I might just have to do that and forfeit any pension when a Sim with a profession becomes an elder. That's better than earning $30,000 a week for doing nothing!

I recently retired a Sim in the Stylist career and her pension is like $4,956 a day. It's absolutely ridiculous. Especially since this is a Challenge game I'm playing. These Ambitions career pay ridiculous salaries in the first place, and then slap giant pensions on top of it. My family is drowning in cash and I wish it would stop.

Ugh, that's bad news. The thing is I really love this expansion, because I've always played Sims that are completely work-obsessed and having so much flexibility with work is great. But I like to work hard for my money and this is making it too easy.

The whole compensation scheme in The Sims 3 is out of whack. I expect that the lower levels of a career would not pay well, and one would have to have room mates (or live in an apartment) just to get by. However, by the time someone reaches the top of their career, they should be rolling in dough, which is not always the case. (By the same token, reaching the top of a career should not be easy, nor should it be impossible.) If a sim is a CEO, a world renown surgeon or a rock star, they should be able to afford some of the more expensive homes one finds uploaded here or elsewhere without any trouble. And they certainly should be able to move into some of the more moderately priced homes without using cheats.

By the time someone retires, the kids should be grown and out of the home and the retiree should be in more modest housing. Pensions need to be more modest. The pension system is only part of what needs to be fixed.

However, in the game it is quite possible to make gobs and gobs of money. 30,000 simoleons in a week is nothing. Try a million. Since I know how to make lots of money, the imbalance does not drive me all that crazy. Not enough to do something about it.

I suspect that this can be adjusted by adjusting a few xml files, for somebody ambitious enough to do it.

Wow, it really sounds like you guys are mad at this! $7000 a day. Just too much money. Imagine real life, my god. You wouldn't want it to stop. But I do agree, it's ridiculous.

I just want the game to be challenging. I might donate the excess money to charity or buy some useless sports cars.

I bought a useless sports car for my retired stylist's YA daughter. The family wealth is already back up to 80k, lol. It just never stops.
I know a stylist in RL who is pretty wealthy, she's even done Bill Clinton's hair, but even she doesn't pull in this kind of money.

Haha. Yeah, rock star and international spy I can understand, but firefighter and stylist gaining thousands a day? I honestly thought it was a bug.

I for one LOVE the ridiculously high pension. It is pretty stupid though, but I'm never unhappy with some extra money for my simmies. Only the best for them!!

The money flow as it is now is ridiculous. I like making families of different wealth and it sucks when I place a family in a small house to be a A4 family, yet even halfway up the ladder on both of them I'm already starting to have too much. Don't want them all to have big houses with nice cars etc. Same goes for professions. Some times I just have one sims doing all as it rakes in so much money.

I suspect that the bug is that it is taking a "Weekly" stipend and transforming it into a "Daily" pension, resulting in your sim getting more retired than he did at work. Will squash if found.

Okay, so a look at the system reveals the following:
1. The pension "amount" is equal to 6x the amount of your average daily income earned while working at that job. This is fairly large.
2. The pension amount is only paid at the "weekly stipend" day, however, so the end result is that your pension is about 6/7ths your average income.

In practice, this means whatever you were earning before, you basically keep earning. Value #1 above can be tuned in the XML if you think it's too massive.

Forgive me but what is the XML? Also is it possible to just choose "Quit job" instead of "Retire" and therefore forfeit your retirement if you want?

Edit: I've looked it up and the XML is obviously a modding tool. Not sure I'm clued up enough to start tinkering with the game.

i have to say, your sim WAS at the top. don't you feel like they've earned it a little bit?

you'd have to imagine, retired top of the line fire fighters are pretty well off.

You have a point. My firefighter basically dedicated her adult life to her work, never having time to make friends because there were so many emergencies and overtime work to take care of.

But I still don't think a fire chief would make more than a rock star!

Yes, it's possible. No different than an adult quitting their job.

And I agree about the ridiculous amounts of money. My architectural designer had more money by the time she became an elder than my pre-ambitions legacy family had after ten generations. Granted, I did play several weeks with aging off, but even so the amount of cash was absolutely ludicrous.

Yeah, it's beginning to turn me off Ambitions a bit. I guess I can just use the extra cash to do things I normally wouldn't, like buying lots of property and cars.

It's not just ambitions, it's the whole game! Cash everywhere unless you chose to do nothing with your sim, hehe

Yeah, with opportunities there are a lot of different ways to make money. Choice is good, it's just harder than ever to have a moderately well-off Sim that struggles now and then with money (although when you have a mansion now the bills are astronomical!)

The insanely huge pensions are an easily tweakable setting in the XMLs. If you cut the "Pension Multiplier" from about 6 to 0.5, you'll see a much more reasonable, and by reasonable, I mean paltry, pension.

Start buying the town or making unneeded remodels to your Sims homes (buy everything top of the line!). It's what I did. I'm somehow still at 400k from 500k though... though I haven't finished my current remodel. Hopefully I can get it down to 100k...

I looked into the XML and it seems you need to have a PC to edit it (I'm on a Mac). I guess I'll just have to do without pensions altogether and get on with fighting fires. =D

No you don't. Macs can edit XMLs just fine, they are simply regular text files.

Really? I will definitely look into that. It's just that I read a guide on here that said you needed to download some user-made software which required a PC.

Well, IngePE runs on Windoze, but I believe EchoPE uses Jawa and should run on Mac. Plus the packages could simply be built manually using compilable command line tools or even a hex editor.

My firerfighter was making a little over 10,000 a day upon retiring. I thought it was redicoulous. He was able to put all 5 of his kids nice houses when they moved out though.