The Simoleon vs The US Dollar

Chapter 30 has forced me to consider the monetary conversion between the simoleon and the USD.

This is pretty tricky considering what a simoleon buys you. A computer, for instance, will average about 1,000 simoleons (which would seem to imply that the simoleon is very similar to the USD is terms of value) but a small house in a crap neighborhood will range between 12,000-18,000 simoleons. This would imply an enormous discrepancy between the simoleon and the USD. If we justify the cost of housing by saying that maybe there is some kind of enormous government subsidy being given to home buyers, then maybe we can start to guess at the conversion?

For the purposes of the story, I'm going to say that 1.00 simoleon is approximately equal to $2.00. Why? Because a $2,000 computer is by no means unheard of. And when I think about the cheapest house that money can buy in the US, it comes to about $60,000. While a subsidy that covers er what? About 77% of the actual cost of the house seems completely out of control, it's still the best explanation that I can think of at the moment. That is until you get into the question of wealth. When you start the game, the Goth family household has well over 500,000 simoleons. If you read the little blurb about Pleasantview in the neighborhood screen, it says something like "Mortimer has finally come into his millions". This would mean that my conversion is way, way off. And then there is the question of wages, which I'm not even going to skim the surface of.

So what can 6,000 simoleons buy the Mindelsohn children? A lot. In Pleasantview, that's a crap load of money. But I can't really say just how much. I'm happy to keep my conversion rate just to give us a reference point. It also makes sense when we look at the cost of clothing and buy mode items. But this really makes me wonder what Maxis was thinking when they set-up their money system. A day maid or a nanny could never live in Pleasantview on what her wages bring in! (But of course, in the story, we could always just attribute their wages to discrimination. Also, Townies can't own property and could probably make ends meet just on what a maid makes for a living.)

Then of course, there are the mysterious bills that sims recieve. What are these bills? What do they pay for? As far as I can tell, it's some sort of property tax. The nicer your house, the higher your bills. Also, sims must be paying into life insurance somewhere in this pile of mysterious bills because their friends and family cash in when they die of old age. Even so, the bills tend to be pretty cheap in proportion to the sims' income. WTF, I say.

I could go on and on about this forever but the idea is just for you out there in Readerland to keep in mind what things cost and what sort of income people make in game whenever I mention money.