Quick Cash Without A Loan

[AshTym 31]

Here's an easy way to get a quick boost of cash, equal to or greater than that provided by taking out a bond.

 

Raise your taxes to 20% for a few hours, then lower them back to what you previously had them set at. This will give you almost the same amount of money as a bond, for free! You can do this quite often with absolutely no detriment to your citizens; not one abandonment or mention of these secret tax hikes anywhere.

 

Obviously this won't do much if you have a tiny population but as your city grows, so too will the amount of money you get from using this trick.

[dan008 2]

Here's an easy way to get a quick boost of cash, equal to or greater than that provided by taking out a bond.

 

Raise your taxes to 20% for a few hours, then lower them back to what you previously had them set at. This will give you almost the same amount of money as a bond, for free! You can do this quite often with absolutely no detriment to your citizens; not one abandonment or mention of these secret tax hikes anywhere.

 

Obviously this won't do much if you have a tiny population but as your city grows, so too will the amount of money you get from using this trick.

 

 

Does this really work? Its really quite hard to save up to build more expensive buildings. 

[Major_Heartfire 1]

I have always been much more conservative than you when doing this. I usually only raise them to about 14% - 17% depending on the project I am trying to fund.

 

 

Edit: Yes it does work, but don't do it for too long. Less than a day. Then wait a day before raising them again.

[dan008 2]

I have always been much more conservative than you when doing this. I usually only raise them to about 14% - 17% depending on the project I am trying to fund.

 

 

Edit: Yes it does work, but don't do it for too long. Less than a day. Then wait a day before raising them again.

 

Cool, gonna try it out.

[City Planner 121]

Yeah there seems to be this weird little delay between raising taxes and when the Sims realize it's happened.  I assure you that if my local sales tax took a hike of 11% even for one day I'd notice it, 

 

Speaking of taxes, I sure wish that the sims would be more tolerant and understanding of higher taxes, I mean if I'm providing them with some really good services and it's blanketing the whole town, it would be nice if the sims actually understood that it costs more money to do that and accepted it better than so many of them saying, "I'm leaving this 11% tax is too much".  Obviously it would need to depend on population, tax rate, how well all the services are blanketing the entire town etc.

 

I remember when our local taxes went up because they put in a sewer system for everybody in my city, when before we were on septic and leach field systems, most people gladly went along with the tax hike because they were getting something of value to them, a proper sewer system in our town.  On the other hand when they hiked the sales tax because the mayor mismanaged the town a few years back people were just about revolting over it and it was repealed not too long afterwards.  So for the right reasons it would be nice if the sims had AI that understood this kind of thing.

 

Oh well, one can certain dream of a day.

[MOWS 4 U 169]

Interesting.  Someone adventurous should figure out just how many hours you can jack up taxes for without pissing off the sims/getting abandoned buildings.

[Major_Heartfire 1]

Probably around 12 hours. The sims could update at 6am and 6pm when they get called for work. So see if jacking up the taxes at 5am has a similar effect to jacking them up at 7am, or if the 7am seems to have a delayed effect.

[MOWS 4 U 169]

I have the answer!  At 7 hours happiness everywhere drops.

[dan008 2]

I have the answer!  At 7 hours happiness everywhere drops.

 

you meant 7am? 

[Nachoraver 0]

I tried this at various times yesterday during the day as was unable to successfully do it for more than an hour.  I was instantly greeted with people whining that the taxes are too high

[buttonhead 9]

Hi guys!  Just wanted to report that I tried this trick with mixed results on my city with 100k population.  I raised taxes across the board to 16% during the hours of 1am-5am.  I made a nice chunk of money, but by 3am, industry was complaining about the high taxes.  By 5am, residential was complaining, and after the experiment was done, later in the day, several of my medium wealth residential buildings suddenly had 'bad neighbors'.  Low wealth was popping up in my medium wealth areas, because land value had dropped.  Also, several of my low wealth apartments suddenly had 'no money', while others were just complaining that it was too bad taxes were so high. 

 

So, if you choose to do this, it will give you money in a pinch, but beware the reprecussions.  The money is coming straight from your Sims' pockets.  If I try it again, I will only do it 1 hour at a time and see if I can get away with it.  24 hours, as the original poster suggested, would have ruined my city.

[boo123456 0]

You don't even have to do it for a few hours at a time.  one minute will do:

 

 

[McFluffy 4]

This used to work for me. But now even after 2 hours they complain. And they all gave the message out of money, and once I did it got a bunch of homeless. The sudden explosion of homeless sims it might been a combo of high unemployment at the time. The tax complaint lasted over quite some time as well.

[GenXisT 127]

lol... you're violating EULA using an exploit... blah blah blah!!!!

 

nice find... 

[Vorret 49]

lol... you're violating EULA using an exploit... blah blah blah!!!!

 

nice find... 

 

I'd say it's clever use of game mechanism

[Rhadamant5186 19]

The trouble in using any of these tax raising methods is that the game actually simulates the wealth and income of its workers. Each worker you have generates a certain amount of tax revenue based upon their base hourly salary which is determined by their job and the amount you are taxing them. Using this trick might give you quick cash, but it will also prevent your society from 'Wealthing Up' and also causes people to shop less. It was only working before because of how much latency there was on the servers, you could 'get away' with doing this for long periods of time, but now with the servers running a bit more smoothly this will hit you faster as McFluffy found out the hard way.

[SirChick 184]

lol... you're violating EULA using an exploit... blah blah blah!!!!

 

nice find... 

 

It's not an exploit it was how Maxis coded the game. Exploits is taking advantage of something that should not be happening (like a bug).

[Prankemperor 3]

This is my cash flow after about 2hrs or less since i started the city. I will let it accumulate to 2-3mil before i start remodelling the entire city piece by piece. All of the roads except for the one connecting from the highway are low density dirt roads. At one point of time I was earning 22k-25k an hr at tax rates of 11-12%

 

The flow has gone down as I had to add expensive services and mass transits and started specialisation and remodellling a bit.

 

[AshTym 31]

24 hours, as the original poster suggested, would have ruined my city.

 

 

I never suggested doing this for 24 hours. That would just be foolish. I said "a few hours" ie. two or three hours.