Bills

[Ijzabela]

I have two questions regarding bills, and I hope it's okay to have them in the same thread, as they are so closely related.

My first question is how often do you get bills? I have been unable to see a pattern in how often they appear, since it's not very often. Is it totally random, or do you get bills every x day or so?

My second question is what decides how "big" the bills are? I haven't noticed that the bills get more expensive with a higher salary, it rather seems like it has to do with the value of your property, but have anyone found the "formula" of it, if you know what I mean? I'm guessing it might be a certain percent of your property value, but I have nothing to prove this with, so would be interesting to know.

It would help a lot with money management if I knew this! Thanks in advance

[imayu94]

I'm just going to include here the fact that I think the lights factor into bills and electricity use, I think. Which is why autolights is a useful function since the open lights are needed, then turned off when not used.

I can't be of much help about the bills schedule since I also thought that it was a once a week deal, and I'm just not paying attention.

[DarkWalker]

If I got the tuning and script files correctly:

- Bills are supposed to be delivered Monday, 5am, every week.
- Bills are a percentage of the billable household value, defined as the value of the furnished lot, plus everything in the household inventory and everything in the inventory of every household sim; it explicitly excludes the household funds. The percentage is 2% for the first §20K of value, then 3% for what exceeds that up to §30K, then 3.5% to §50K, and 5% of anything above that.
(As an example, a §100K value household will pay 2% of the first §20K, then 3% of the next §10K, 3.5% of the next §20K, and 5% of the remaining §50K, for a grand total of §3900.)
- The Frugal trait reduces the bills by 25%.
- If the bill goes unpaid the sim gets the electricity turned off, and then the water turned off, apparently with 48 hours between cutting the electricity and the water.

[Ijzabela]

Thank you so much for your answers! This will help me a lot

[ManiSims]

I haven't  forgotten to pay bills in any game so far, but I like the idea of getting electricity/water turned off. It makes it more realistic and a lot better than the repoman randomly coming and taking something. (I hated the repoman... *shudder*)

[Krysee]

Frugal reduces your bills by 25%, per sim.  Not to say four sims with Frugal is -100% bills, but each sim with Frugal takes a pass at the bills, lowering the current amount by 25%.  It goes like this:

Original §10,000
Frugal #1: §7,500
Frugal #2: §5,625
Frugal #3:  §4,219
Frugal #4:  §3,164
Frugal #5:  §2,373

And how those five sims will look on your bill estimate is +§7,627 in the "tax breaks & penalties" section, and the tooltip for that line will repeat "From Frugal Living" five times.

The mathematical formula for this, if you're interested, is multiplying the total bill estimate by 0.75 (the amount that's left after the 25% reduction) to the power of the number of people with the Frugal trait.  If we let the variable F be People With Frugal, and use B to stand in for a bills estimate then this will work in a spreadsheet cell:

Final = B*(0.75^F)