DESCRIPTION: Bills come more often and are much larger.

Update to fix a bug in apartment billing.

If you wish to adjust the billing rate download Loan Jar. The Loan Jar allows you to adjust billing level from 0 (roughly Maxis level bills, but coming 6 days a week) to 6 (crazy expensive). The default level is 4 if you either don't use Loan Jar or if you don't adjust the initial settings. Billing changes affect the entire neighborhood (including subhoods) but not other neighborhoods.

Loan Jar might also be necessary to borrow money as your families get used to the higher bills.

You might also want Cyjon's Debugger for the Appraise House function so you can experiment with how different settings affect the bills.

As a point of reference, under the default setting of this mod Brandi Broke's bills go from 188/week to 3,384/week. Cash-rich Mortimer Goth has his bills go from 1,052/week to 165,816/week! In his case, over 100,000 of that is due to his massive cash holdings so his bills will drop to a mere 18,936 once his cash balance drops below 10,000.

Houses get bills 6 days a week (Sunday excluded) and each bill comes to (0.4% + 0.5% per level) of the empty lot value, (0.6% + 0.7% per level) of the value of objects on the lot, and (0.0% + 1.2% per level) of the cash on hand. Lot and object values are first rounded down to the nearest 1,000 and cash to the nearest 10,000.

Apartments get bills 6 days a week and each bill comes to (1% + 0.5% per level) of the object value (only objects in the current family's apartment) and (0.0% + 1.2% per level) of the cash on hand; there is no property tax or charge for common area objects. Sims get normal weekly rent payments on top of this.

Dorms get bills every day (including Sunday) and pay tuition of ($125 per level) per playable student. This is designed for my Semester Changes but is bearable in normal play. Students will need either rich parents, lots of scholarships, or really good grades - or more than one of these.

Greek houses get bills every day. They pay the tuition for each student plus 10% of the normal residential costs.

Private university housing pays tuition for each student plus 20% of the normal residential costs.

Energy rebates for solar panels and windmills from Mansions & Gardens are 1/3 the amount but since the bills come 3x as often it is the same weekly total. In apartments, energy rebates are divided by the number of apartments in the complex, regardless of who owns the item. It's not really cost effective for apartment residents to buy their own green energy sources.

Although the default numbers sound high, I think you'll be surprised how easy it is to survive. I played with this level of bills in my Apocalypse game to reflect the syndicate payments and still had massive amounts of money, which is exactly why I made this mod.

TRICKS: Build mode objects (walls, trees, floors, etc.) aren't counted in these calculations so are a way to "hide" your money. You can also place expensive items in your inventory where they will not be taxed. Cash is rounded down to the nearest 10,000 that means you can keep up to 9,999 on hand without increasing your bills.

LAST UPDATE: November 9, 2011

KNOWN CONFLICTS:

• Pescado's dormbillfix, but my mod fixes that problem so you don't need it.
• Buyable mailboxes. The ones I've seen actually replace the mailbox with an exact copy but have their own group numbers and their own mail routines so can't be changed by this mod. Not only that but since they are replacing global objects, they tend to hide in your game even if you delete the buyable mailbox mod. Thanks go to reggikko for figuring that one out.

REQUIRED EPs: Nightlife or later

COMPATIBLE EPs: All configurations from Nightlife through Apartment Life/Mansions & Gardens.

FUTURE DEVELOPMENT: The next version will allow setting each component of bills (property tax, object tax, cash tax, tuition) separately. The version after that will allow setting taxes on a lot or family basis which override global tax rates. ETA is "sometime before the universe explodes", but don't hold me to that.