Lately I've been thinking about economic trouble and how to bring it about for my sims.

There's the personal, one sim/one family trouble:

1. Sim gets fired (or graduates from and fails to find another job, can't pay his bills, loses house/must downgrade.
2. Sim is living above his/her means, takes out loans, fails to pay back loans, goes bankrupt.
3. Sim has mortage/business loan. Either loses job or business is bad, can't pay back loans, loses house/business.
4. Sims divorce, Sim either has to pay alimony which causes him to lose a lot of money. Or he just has a really bad lawyer and loses a lot of his assets.
5. Sims can't sell their house so there's a double morgage.

But then I got to thinking about some more large scale, like some kind of large scale fraud that leaves a lot of sims without pension/savings/etc. Or a economic recession that hits the entire neighborhood. But I'm not entirely sure how to implement them.

So, I come to you all for inspiration. How do you cause economic trouble for your sims? Do you have some neighborhood-wide (or at least larger scale than a single family) economic trouble? How did you implement that?

One way you could add economic trouble is limit the type of jobs available and then limit it farther by only allowing so many people to have each job. For instance, the slacker career would no longer be available as during economic trouble, who would be paying people to party? Culinary would be available to a point, since many people (at least where I live) turn to fast food jobs when higher paying jobs are not available, but only so many people in the neighborhood could have the job as there are so many spots open. The criminal career could be open, but have a risk added to it, such as, if a certain number on a die is rolled, then the sim would be caught and put in a prison so not everybody would be willing to have a criminal job.

Download a mod to raise the price of bills so that it would be harder for bills to be paid. If you have OFB, allow sims to only work for other sims and no maxis careers.

I could probably think of other things, but that is all I can think of at the moment.

You could implement inflation, and limit all purchases to Sim-owned shops where you manually set prices to match your decided inflated price. Combined with a bigger bills mod, that could drastically increase the cost of living, and thus lead to a hood-wide economy drain.

Amura has great bigger bills mods, with many different levels so you can decide yourself how expensive it should be.

Most of my sims are poor and that isn't through trying hard.
1. Use the halved wages mod. This cuts in half every maxis career. it doesn't cut custom one but they are easily edited in simPE.
2.Use slower skilling. This stops rapid promotions except to uni grads.
3. Make Uni harder to go to. I use harder schools grades, but there is also harder uni grade mods as well. Some fail, some don't go.
4. Use NPC jobs found at MTS. These are low paying jobs for those without a lot of education.
5. Use no 20K handouts
6. use the job stopinator so sims simply can't advance.
7. For hired sims at businesses there is also a mod so they won't quit due to low wages.
9. Make rules for your hood such as 'money doesn't grow on trees'. So no digging for treasure, no money trees, no buying of cheap cc items that sells for a lot, no free money. Use move objects to delete Humbles computer if you want. I still use it to look for jobs. No selling in buy mode.
10. If you can't pay your landlord 3 times or the Repo man shows up three times you get kicked out.

I guess it depends if you want your hood to have real widespread poverty or if it's only a story line.
I don't use higher bills as many of my sims would than be homeless and I already have a small handful. Once a sim/family are homeless I have rules for getting out of that including a very, very low paid homeless job. At the same time I also have a charity shop and I am thinking of opening a soup kitchen in that hood. In my other hood I don't have homeless as that is a far nicer and smaller hood and the poor have a shelter.

Also-you should make a rule that if someone loses their job, they can either go on welfare or collect unemployment for the duration-I know there's an 'unemployed' job on this site, which gives the recipient a small stipend for how ever long they wish to use it for. You can roll for how many weeks they'll be without a job.

I do that and I also use a hacked table to give sims the welfare amount. (sorry, this is a very old hack, and I got it second hand..)

But you would have to apply the rules universally so nobody can escape them.

The social security job I use is here: http://www.insimenator.org/showthread.php?t=22809 but far too well too paid for me. Sims can earn more on that than at the NPC job. I think it is set at something like $600 per week and I changed it to be $200 per week. It's very easy to change in simpe.

I second what has already been mentioned, especially no20k handouts and limiting the jobs sims can do. One major rule I have is that the sims can only skill most skills on community lots, of course you need the Community Lot Skilling mod. My sims are so tired from their jobs that it makes it really tough go anywhere to skill, making promotions more difficult.

My other main rule is that poor sims can only rent. I do have some low cost apartments, but low cost comes with a price, like less space, low quality plumbing, flooring, and walls, and less skilling items on the lot. Thank goodness for bunkbeds or my sims would be screwed once they start having kids! My cheapest apartments are efficiencies priced 855. My most popular 2 bed 1 bath apartments are 965-995. They're cheap because the complex only provides lights in the bathroom and kitchen. Renters must then supply their own lighting everywhere else. It's fun trying to fit furniture in there as the family grows.

There are some great low income jobs available on MTS alone, and probably other places but this site has my favorites. Check out the NPC careers: Mega Pack 1 and Mega Pack 2. I personally love Widget Worker and Coal Mining.

Thank you for sharing this. How did I pass this up on their site? 600/wk is not enough to cover rent in my town...... oh the fun I'll have with that!

Does it still have the "you missed work" message on Saturday? If that's the only thing wrong with it, that's doable for me.

I think the last sim I used this on did have the pop-up, but it doesn't seem to affect anything.

A spoiled heir/heiress lives extravagantly thanks to a relative, but when said relative dies, they leave them nothing, meaning they're now broke. Alternatively, the heir or heiress inherits money, but spends it all on luxury and goes broke

All very cool ideas. It's always fun to see how everyone thinks about this, it sparks my own creativity :D

I guess it depends on how you usually play? If you normally play the game as it ships, you could consider cutting some of the benefits that normal gameplay provides, like the $20,000 handout for graduates? Or you could start charging tuition fees for university, because "the state of the economy meant that it was no longer feasible for the government to subsidise students"? Or you could use Cyjon's bigger bills & loan jar to make sims pay higher bills, perhaps with the thought that it reflected higher utility prices or taxation?

Monique's computer has the ability to do all the financial aspects of a loan, and they take it out automatically. Gets paid no matter what the sim has, and if it's negative, they're in debt up to their eyeballs forever..and ever.

The loan jar from Cyjon is of course, very useful, with variable billing throughout the neighborhood.

Of course you could go the whole hog route, go to Simpe, load up each family, and put in a big fat 0 for their funds, and watch them have fun trying to make the bills.