Hey all,

Quick question.

Is it possible for a lot to not share money and instead, each Sim have their own money. Each time you select a Sim on the lot, the money will change to their money. I've been making a lot of multi-family/house lots lately and it's kinda lame to have everyones money piled into one big account. :P

Is there a mod/hack to resolve this? I only have the base TS3 game.

No..I wish there was. I wish there was a whole banking system. Unfortunately there isn't though.

You can post in WCIF to find out if there's a mod already (help menu).

I know that one modder, Granthes, spent some time looking into making a safe object that would be ownable by an individual sim and could hold their own cash... he wound up abandoning it as unfeasible though. Don't know if anybody else has figured out a solution.

I did my money bag mod for this purpose. It's not exactly what you are looking for as you obviously described it as being more autonomous, but I've used them for having multi-family housings, as well as loan taking and paying it back. Twallan also has some money related options in his master controller, you might want to take a look at that.

Why do people even keep asking for this? What SENSE would it make? Sims don't even have the ability to SPEND money without the player authorizing it. All their finances are controlled strictly by the player. Sims can't make any meaningful expenditures without the player doing it for them. So what exactly would it even MEAN for "one sim" to have the money, given that build/buy is the main place to spend money, and such expenditures are on the household level? It makes no sense.

It makes lot of sense if for example you have a sim renting a room in their house and you want the tenant's money to stay separate from the lot owners money. If you are an organized player, you could mark every penny the tenant makes into a nice excel, but as an un-organized player, I find it easier to control multiple incomes when I can physically keep them separate.

I agree with ani. If I wanted mt teen sim to go to the movies with the money she/he makes working part-time why should it be shared?

You could use your maths skills to give each family a budget and keep track of the money in a word document *Prepares to have tomatos thrown, as everyone hates maths*

The game concept revolves around the household structure and not individualism , so naturally, EA would not bother with this. And i don't see any modders going to create this system anytime soon due to major changes to the core and maintenance costs whenever a new patch gets released.

But since sims can't actually SPEND money unless YOU spend the money, whose money is being spent? If a fambly consisting of 4 people all with "separate" monies buys a couch, who pays? When the couch is then dumped because you need a new couch, who gets the money from that, and who loses the money for the replacement couch? It seems like you want each individual household item and structure to have its ownership individually tracked, which would be a massive bookkeeping effort on the part of the game for no real practical benefit, which is that ultimately, for the house to get built and furnished, the entire household must end up pooling its funding anyway.

Who gets the money from the old couch, and who pays for the new one, depends on which household's apartment is getting renovated. When I was playing a household that consisted of one landlord and three tenants. Every day when the tenants got home from work, I changed their wage to the equivalent amount of moneybags, and put it in their inventory, thus they basically were carrying their household funds with them. The household money, that you see in the UI, was the land-lords money. Every week when it was time to pay rent rent, every tenant cashed in the needed amount, if they needed to buy something, I cached in the needed amount, if they sold their own items, I brought a new money bag that was the closes to the sold object. If the object being sold/brought was in the common area, then it was the landlords money because he's responsible for those.


If having separate money would ever become a mod that wouldn't consist of physical object, but the game would enable each Sim to have their own account from which you could add or withdraw money. It doesn't have to have anything to do with tracking object. Deciding which household owns the couch should be left to the player to decide, because as you said, it's a massive bookkeeping effort on the part of the game for no real practical benefit.

Here's the problem: The game is not equipped to make such a decision. Therefore, when an object is bought or sold, if sims had separate individual accounts, the game would have to immediately decide who pays for it. One of two things would happen:
1. Everyone pays some arbitrarily divided, probably even, share.
2. Purchases can only be conducted from a slush fund, I.E., the household funds. A giant headache ensues as you have to manually manage each individual's sim's finances and contribution to said fund, where such a thing is only contributes to gameplay in a bizarre corner case that deviates from standard gameplay.

A physical object really only provides a point of click. There's no reason why someone couldn't simply inject the interactions directly onto a sim or another object, such as the phone...

Except if this became the STANDARD behavior, a massive nuisance would ensue as the player is forced to juggle cash in inventories every time they wish to make a purchase. It would just be a giant mess.

Honestly, it would be easier to create an actual landlord and tenancy system than it would be to try to break apart the household as the basic financial entity while retaining uninterrupted gameplay.

I'm probably missing the point, but this is what I'm seeing:

- Have one account and designate a "head of household" to manage it.
- Allow other members of the household to have seperate accounts.
- All purchases for cooking food, edit/buy mode come from the "HOH" account.
- If a single sim (other than "HOH") makes a purchase a popup asks if "HOH" funds or personal funds should be used, then refuses the purchases if the selected payment method is insufficient.
- If a sim in a group makes a purchase (a rabbithole restaurant for example) then a popup asks if "HOH" funds or personal funds from the list of sims of in the group should be used. Again, payment method is refused if insufficient.
- If a sim not in focus attempts to make a purchase using "HOH" funds a popup comes up asking if it is allowed.

If you want, you could further complicate it by putting restrictions on how teens and kids spend their money. They would get a "mom and dad" are mean moodlet for a few hours.

As for how money gets in the "HOH" account, I would prefer the sim designated as the "HOH" has all of his/her income deposited in it. Then when new young adults or adults are added a popup asks how much of a percentage of their salary is added to the account. Then an option on the "HOH" sim appears when clicked that lets other members of the household "Give money to HOH" as a "gift". Or, the other way around, for the "HOH" to give money to other household members. You could also add "borrowing" but that could get complicated.

As for why anyone would want this? I guess, why not? Sometimes playing the game gets a little boring, so adding another layer of complexity would be welcome. Yes, I know it also adds more bugs, but if we were really that scared of bugs we wouldn't be playing this game.

As for how it would be done, it would be better if EA added the functionality first. Then the modders could come along and "fix" it (so to speak).

Not a headache, but it was a nuisance. Even thou the biggest nuisance came from juggling four households in one.