Show HN: I made a sandbox game to help with financial planning

- I have an unread email in the inbox but I can't find it

- The banks send me emails with no content in the body, some email glitch on their side

- I tried to buy a property, lost my solicitor's fee but never got the property

- There are no good jobs available except one underpaid junior position

- I pay way too much in tax compared to what I make

Optimizing life for filling the savings account as fast as possible at the expense of everything else has consequences and your game should reflect this.

You should have stats including your characters age, health, happiness and social skills and have some kind of social media app with your friends constantly trying to invite you out for concerts, nights out, dating? and so on so that you have constant distractions to spend your money on to make it more challenging. Not building up the happiness and social skills stats should have consequences. You should be able to buy a gym membership to keep your health stat from deteriorating.

The consequences of not building up those stats early in your life is poor health, shit social skills and no friends except for the people you work with. But yay, you're a millionaire I guess?

The real game of life is that it's all a balancing act between having your financial house in order while also having a fulfilling social life, health, and happiness

- how would you get 4% gains in real life? it makes a massive difference, but you're unlikely to reach this unless the money is put into the stock market

- was unable to sell my property (the "request valuation" button does nothing)

- the university option never showed up

- there were no further jobs after ~12 years of career (stopped at something like engineering manager at ~45k/year which is very low for London)

- advancing month-by-month is pretty slow. there should be a way of fast-forwarding to important events (new job, promotion, housing market goes up/down, etc)

- had to transfer $ to savings / pension in batches every year or so, losing out on a lot of interest. should be possible to set a monthly amount

- the expenses are way too stable to reflect real life

I ended the simulation at 35 years old, with €200k savings, €60k mortage equity, and €80k on a pension fund. Living on a €100k house, no car, no gifts, no travel, no family. It's not bad, but for someone saving fiercely from 18 years without any major expenses it's not a great result. Getting a high-paying job (80k+) around your 30s will land you in the exact same place, while giving you 12 years to live more liberally.

For comparison my first job which required a uni degree and was in central london in 2003 was £18k a year. Rent on a bedsit was £520 a month, transport was £120 a month, student loan £59 a month, leaving £100 a week for food, bills (internet, electricity, tv, council tax, laundry+dry cleaning, etc), travel to see families, etc

It's a great way of showing the massive leg-up that people who have parents living in the London commuter-belt get though.

It would be nice if the houses showed the energy expenses and fees. And mortgages show the interest rate and the expected monthly payments.

Oh, and every property still shows the green "Purchase successful" message since I bought the first property.

Also It's not clear to me if I take the job I can't go to university? I took the job in the absence of another choice, like real life if I got a great alternative offer I would leave the job and do that instead.

Nice work :-)

- Gain graph? Some type of means to show how the gains have earned. Understand you're opting for a simulation of reality but it might help with understanding what is going on.

- Economic changes / opportunities? New stock, new financial products or travel opportunities. The email inbox is quite neat and it allows perhaps for these events to be introduced.

You may also like some of the mechanics from: https://thefounder.biz/play/ https://graebor.itch.io/sort-the-court

- The year is now 2030

- I have 300,000 in my bank account

- I own two houses worth 200k

- I'm still paying monthly mortgage payments to a house I fully own

- 100k in pension

- All this with just 55k/yr

- Still paying mum rent

If you want unlimited amount of money:

Get any job, then edit the "next turn" button to include an id.

Then just run this in the console:

const but = document.getElementById('theidyoupicked');

for (let i = 0; i < 500; i++) { setTimeout(() => but.click(), 1000 * i)}

You can lower the amount of time on the timeout, but it seems like there is some logic to prevent too fast calls.

But be gentle, it seems like it does a http request each time you click on "next turn" (I hope the author has some stable hosting because people who play will spam this button anyway).

I have hundreds of thousands of money but I cannot see a single property or car. It seems like there are a few bugs still.

I bought two properties so far (hindsight is awesome), but I'm still paying rent to mom, apparently I didn't move in.

Now I cannot sell or rent them out.

Also, not much happens? I just sit here watching numbers go up.

Read the first few emails, checked out the bank and web and started advancing next turn.

And... nothing.. just calendar advancing month at a time.

No new e-mails warning me of unemployment, no warnings about expiring bank balance.

You'd expect that your bank account at least would go down.

Hopefully, I am not considered dead - incidentally it would be realistic to add some actuary data to the game. Not everyone makes it retirement.

I would, however, like to have the ability to automate my contributions to savings and the pension (like in real life). Other than that, I am going to park this in front of my high school senior to see what kind of decisions he makes. Thanks for building this!

- I was able to purchase a property for only £1100

- To buy without mortgage, you should explicitly enter 0 as mortgage amount

- This purchase didn't appear in my current account as a transaction, only the balance decreased correctly

- The property didn't appear on Property tab (but I started to get utility bills)

- No interest on pension account

I would make the next turn button a bit more prominent as I did not notice it at first. I would also maybe add a bit more of a tutorial. Really cool and keep it up.

  1. don't know why it need to calls to get https://simulator.money/img/windows-xp-bg.jpg and dings/chimes.mp3 on every month.  (Although cached by browser)
  2. After purchase a property, it does not listed under properties tab in the bank, even with monthly utility bills.
  3. Some missing mails there, maybe associate with mismatch unread count.
  4. As a player, I am not sure what is the unit of "mortgage last", is it month or years?

That said a few of you might like to see that game. It is available on internet archive, can be played online and is quite unusual for its time.

At least I was happy to find it and played it once against the Jones AI (it is way funnier with friends).

also I'm paying my mum rent after I bought property wtf?

The browser opens new pages without hiding old ones.

Inbox count is wrong.

Buttons aren't responsive (no, I don't mean mobile design). They give no indication that something is happening.

Dragging windows is buggy.

There is no loading animation on clicking "next turn", nothing that indicates that the month has passed. Just add a dark overlay with a black and white loading bar and show the date afterwards.

I tried this in Chromium and Firefox and the problems are the same.