I don't like the standard Bills at all. You are penalized for having stuff, and are hit especially hard on the first week when the house is brand new, and you don't have skills & job. Then the game forces me to always have new stuff with sell on evict, unless I use a mod. And then I don't get any bills at all if everything stays on evict. It is like a great conspiracy to increase Consumption. On the one hand, they give you 20 thousand, and with the other hand, they take it away. The bills go down by a lot as stuff gets older.

On a dormitory you pay through the nose for all the junk in the common area, even if you fire the lunch lady, and your own room has less expensive furnishings.

I don't know a good replacement for bills.

I think the lot size should result in a constant property tax. Then there could be a charge per resident, which represents his consumption and generation of trash. Room area should be another item to represent another element of property tax and heating in Winter, with the bills increasing inversely proportional to the temperature in winter. Having all objects report their use would introduce incompatibility with other mods. Counting each lamp as 1 unit is wrong because their power is obviously different. The bigger objects should be counted like a hot tub, sauna, shower, toilet. Imagine filling a hot tub & heating it with electricity, bloody hell.

I don't use any bill mods, if by bill mods you mean mods that affect the amount of in game bills.
I do tax sims (depends on the hood) and I do use the wallet token controller to pay for things like baby sitting. I ban bills on dorm lots since they make no sense. I have also banned bills in new hoods as again I don't feel they make sense. If I allow bills or not depends on how I am feeling for a hood. I never allow bills in my medieval hood, I just have my tax collector come around once per year and how much you pay or goods you hand over depends on your class.

Banning bills on dorm lots may be a good idea! (I just cheat, since it does not make sense at all).

I use the exact same dorm for all my students, and there are normally no dormies, only 6 playables in each one. Yet their bills will differ widely from each other!

When not playing dorms, I seldom think about bills. I have had Pescado's money order in my game for years and have used it at times, but it is not an integral part of my game. For some reason my game tends to have a plethora of twins, which means that the budget may be too tight for a daily maid. I simply import a sim to clean the house and pay that sim via the order (not sure the sim knows what she is being paid for). I have also used it to help out a struggling relative or as a gift to a new grandchild.

New Sims from CAS - yes, they come without skills and a job, but there is no real reason not to give them some skills? I like to give them 3 cooking points, because it is nice if they don't burn the brand-new house at once. Buying a house in RL is expensive too, especially when the interest rate goes up 1 week after you have moved in.

I will be interested in what you come up with, though

Why wouldn't you have bills at all in a dormitory? Don't they charge a rent? I've never been in one. You don't buy a share in the building, so I can accept that the rent is greater than a tax would be. But currently I feel it is a bit steep and the calculation is too simplistic. The amount is 6 times that of a normal house if you own all the doors. It should take into account the size of the room like in hotels and the service from NPCs. Usually by the third week you would pay about half of the initial bills because of depreciation.

I'm not planning to make a mod for this but looking to hear about existing mods.

And that's all vanilla behavior? Dang and here I use a mod that makes it twice as expensive.

I find vanilla bills mostly too cheap, apart from rent/deposits which are stupidly high to the point that most of my poor sims were more able to afford an empty giant lot than an apartment. I want apartments to be a cheaper option! So I have mods which increase regular bills and reduce apartment costs.

OK scratch that. I have no idea what bills mods I am using. I just checked in my downloads and nothing I thought was there is there XD I will come back later and investigate when I have time.

I would look into Simler90's utilities mod and then look for a normal bills mod which allows you to reduce the standard bills down to compensate.

Look at Cyjon's bills mods for university lots. I like that they are customisable.

Also expensiveNPCs is a must for me, though I had to tune it to my own liking.

Same here

OK, I found out I am using Amura's Custom Bills set at 300% for my challenge hood, and 1000% for my realistic hood (ouch lol)

I remember now, I stopped using Cyjon's because it annoyed me too much to get them every single day.

I have one of Cyjon's bill mods-it increases the amounts to more realistic levels and they're variable by what a house has. For example, one house has a bi-weekly bill of $102 and that's $204 for the week, while another has a bill of $50 and that makes it $100 a week.

Pretty realistic to me. But I would love a bill mod that bills for the salary instead of the possessions. Like a income tax. It would be dependent on the amount of the salary of the pixel with the highest income of the lot.

But I ask for too much, I know.

Thank you for the recommendations. Yes paying the bills every day would get too tiresome if you have to go to the mailbox. I would rather pay them once a week. Real bills come once a month and some smaller ones come once per quarter, so I think that would be a better approximation. You woud then need to take them to a desk to process. I think the stable bills (once the house is old) are a good amount if they were calculated realistically. But the bills on entry are too great.

I furnished the standard, small 5 door dormitory with modest to moderate stuff. Hotel beds, plain desks, Ikea bookcase, rolling chairs, distressed club sofa. The most expensive things were a driveway with a family car, fence and a fireplace. On the first mailman visit I paid $530 owning 2 doors (= bills * 6 / 5 * 2). By the second week we paid $340, and by the end of the third week, the amount was around $260. The objects go down in value to about 1/3rd but the lot area component stays the same.

Having lights add to power would be nice. An auto lights mod would then actually be of practical value. But them adding 1 unit each is not good. Is too much relative to other heaters, and not enough granularity. I think there is enough range to rebalance comsumers * 10, allowing smaller lights to add 1 to 9.

How much do you pay at an Apartment? I'm curious as I don't play apartments. I only load them on a test hood.

I don't use a bills mod, and am fairly happy with the way the game calculates them, except in dorms!

In The Sims, assets on the lot depreciate over time, and since the bills are based on the lot value, they too get less over time. This applies to almost all assets in The Sims 2, including fixed assets -- i.e. land and buildings. This is broadly the way that accountants and bookkeepers expect assets to behave: unimproved assets should depreciate over time. But for some (to me) obscure reason, in Real Life all land and buildings seem to appreciate wildly in value even when unimproved and actually neglected. I suspect this must really be due to speculation, but I suppose, if enough people believe an asset to be worth that much, that becomes its price. . . What I am saying is that, IMAO, I find the way The Sims 2 handles property and depreciation, more rational than what happens in Real Life. (Note How I capitalise "Real Life". I regard it as a game with particularly capricious rules, that's more unfair, and much less fun to play than The Sims 2. At least our Sims have a realistic prospect of owning their own house. As a teen (19 years old) I owned my own place -- a three room flat. I'd have no chance of doing that today -- the only teenage houseowners I know today are in my game!

So all told I'm quite happy with Maxis vanilla bills for self-owned property. True it's dearer when they first move in, but they can mitigate that by buying a smaller property and furnishing it with cheaper furniture. But I've never had this problem of Sims growing too rich in my game -- it sounds like a First World problem to me. The only really rich Sims in my game were made rich with cheats. The only thing I might want to change in bills is for slightly higher bills for Sims with kids at private schools -- to cover their school fees. Unless of course the kids have some sort of scholarship or bursary.

However I have a very real problem with bills in dorms. In principle I'm happy with student Sims paying something towards their keep, but it must be affordable. I've seen somewhere the formula form dorm bills, and it included a ridiculous multiplier which made the bills extortionate. I play university with extended semesters. Life (mine!) is too short to play six month semesters, but I use the college adjuster clock to make them feel like six months. Yet they were getting enormous bills every couple of days, and they really spoiled the enjoyment of university both for my Sims and for myself. If necessary I'd ban bills in dorms. (How do you do that @joandsarah77 ?) But I'd much prefer them to get affordable bills. At one time I toyed with the idea of trying to write such a mod myself, but I was persuaded that it was far to difficult a task to attempt for for a first go at Simantics scripting.

@AndrewGloria I ban the mail carrier on the Visitor Controller. Very easy so long as you have the EP for it. If not you can also use Boolprop and force error on them.

I think all sorts of service NPCs should be itemized under bills instead of them getting paid instantly when nobody is home, maid, gardener, repairman, lunch lady, paper person bringing magazines. Private school could also be one of those costs. I find it a bit weird that University costs nothing. They're almost begging for you to go there with cheap housing and Dean's List. In reality I think that university is quite expensive.

The walls and land do not depreciate. They count objects that are without stays on evict. There is a flag called "cannot be billed" but it is actually not taken into account. If you buy a bed and pay the full price instead of loan installments, it shouldn't generate any bills. You don't submit to the tax authority how many beds you have.

It is relatively easy to adjust the existing bills amount up or down on the MailBox object. But making the costs be impacted by other objects is not so easy. Those other objects need to report their use.

Dormitory cost is probably reasonable if you have about 10 doors and all rooms almost empty with what they give you by default. No desk, just a wardrobe, bed and one lamp.

If you start with cheaper furniture and later replace it, then you have to pay double. Item depreciation is deeply ingrained in modern consumerist society, where you need to spend more and more and generate waste. So many things today don't last like they used to with critical components made of plastic. There doesn't even need to be a grand conspiracy of manufacturers creating planned obsolescence. People know to act that way by themselves. If you go to a forum and say you have an old computer, they'll likely tell you to throw it in trash.

I remember somebody writing in a guide somewhere that you could invest in art, as it would appreciate in value. I've not noticed much appreciation. We were so honest to report this secret treasure chest to to the tax authority. Now it costs us $50 in bills, about one third of the rest of the house put together. In about 100 weeks we would have paid off its value entirely and continue paying. A fortune aspirant would have a good laugh.

Standard bills make the game far too easy. I use Higher Bills 750% (at least, the file says 750pc so I assume that's what it means). Feels more realistic. Although for the 2020's I'd probably have to go higher if I wanted to be like real life, lol.



For the dorms, well... in real life I'm sure college students don't eat free meals 24/7/365? And there's no tuition in this game, so I pretend that's what the dorm bills are for.

So if a basic house gets $150 bills (after depreciation), which come twice a week I think, you would get $1125 bills? That is $2250 per "week". Two people working might together earn $1000 a day and work maybe 4.5 days, so their income is $4500. That's about half going into bills.

In real life you have the option to save water, electricity & gas. In the game if you use auto-lights, only shower on commlots, eat precooked snacks and have 4 summer quarters, you can't save anything.

I think the game is easy, to the point that there is not much game unless a handicap of some kind is created. It comes from the various ways of getting money added by EPs (shooting a photo of a blank wall, date rewards, digging for maps and rocks). But I don't think bills is a good way to counter-balance that.

In my game I pay for the cafeteria food. Of course those those prices are not in balance with other things such as the salaries of the barista, but I assigned to be consistent with restaurant/cafe, around $10-$15 a piece. You still have to fill the fridge on a dormitory if you use it to cook, which I do on my small luxury 5 door dormitory.

I use Cyjon's Bigger Bills. It has some BCONs to be custoimizable though they arent documented I don't think.

If you buy one of the Solar Panels or the wind Windmill it will generate income. If you have a small lot then the amount will be more than your bills so you never have to go to the post box to pick up or pay bills. If you have a bigger lot then just add more panels or windmills. The postman still comes but you just get a message telling how much you have made once the bills have been deducted.

As for things if you buy it and sell it the same day you will get what you pay for it. i.e. buy an exercise bike at 00:30 use it all day and sell it before midnight you will get what you paid for it. it only depreciates if you hold onto it after midnight.

You can use moveobjects to stack solar panels.

I use a more expensive bills mod because I like the challenge, but I also have a few mods to lower apartment rent and bills because otherwise, fiscally, apartments are much more expensive than houses. I prefer them to be a buffer for poorer sims rather than a bougie, expensive option most of the time.

For dormitories, I just ban the mail delivery person with TwoJeff's Visitor Adjuster. The bills with my current configuration are way too high and impossible to pay for a student. Why should my sims have to pay for the callous use of 50 other sims living in the same building?

I recently got a default replacement of my bills as well, specifically because it makes the red "overdue" notice much harder to see in regular gameplay. I'm hoping my own forgetfulness will manifest for my sims, and I'll get some more encounters with the repoman!

I usually place the Contempto Adirondack End Table near to the post box. Its rustic enough so it doesn't look out of place outside and Sims will put the bills on that rather than putting them on the floor or taking them into the house to put on a table/desk. It makes bills easy to spot, although I haven't tested in in the snow.

That's a good idea! Windkeeper made these also:
https://www.thesimsresource.com/dow...helf/id/181696/

I love those!

Honeywell's Bespoke Build Set also seems to have a mailbox shelf mesh where bills can be placed. I'm unsure of if it was either inspired by or if is an improved version of Windkeeper's. Regardless, I tend to use Honeywell's mesh instead since it's a newer mesh and it comes in a lot of more recoloring options.


The above link is one of my top recommendations for building by the way. Houses look much more realistic with the trim options from that set. And the houses shared by Honeywell are amazing. I've no shame that I used them as a base for many of my lots because they're just that good.

I forgot about that set, @HarVee ! Very nice. Love Honeywell's work!