Financial Summary - Income

Original article written by Regina Moore posted 9 years 0 weeks ago

With SIM 6.0, we have a financial summary of how much money we've earned and spent during our years of playing SIM. If you haven't seen it yet, go under your My Office heading, and then Banking, and then Financial Summary.

It's arranged so you can compare one year to another, if you want to get an idea of how your income and expenses have increased or decreased, compared to another year. I asked The Steward why there weren't totals for a player's entire SIM career, and she said that totals would be coming in the future, but didn't specify how far into the future.

In you want to see the details of any category, go to your bank on your home page, and use the drop down filter. You can have your bank show all the transactions in a specific category, but you can't restrict it to a specific year.

So, in looking at the numbers, surely any player would like to see the income figures go higher, and their expenses become lower. That's what I want to discuss in this pair of articles, as well as defining each category heading.

This article is for the fun part -- the income side of things.

BETS - WINNINGS
This is pretty self-explanatory. Mine is zero, because I don't bet. I assume that the introduction of past performances with SIM 6.0 will stimulate a lot more betting activity.

BOARD INCOME
You have to own a farm to receive income from boarders. Farms cost a hefty $2 million to build, though you can sometimes buy a farm from someone else for cheaper. Just because you own a farm doesn't mean that you'll automatically get board income. The farms closest to a track are usually the ones that are most likely to see boarders, since a lot of players ship their horses to the nearest farm after a race. Even then, however, if your farm is placed next to a track that's open a limited time of the year, or otherwise has few races, then you won't see many boarders.

The minimum board one can charge has been raised from $5 to $20 for Year 41. That's quite a substantial increase for those farms that do have a good number of boarders.

BREEDER AWARDS
For every race run in SIM, the breeder of the winning horse gets 9% of the purse. (So, $900 for a 10k purse, $9,000 for a 100k stakes purse, etc.) Generally, one wouldn't expect to see any breeder awards until, at a minimum, the first horses they've bred are two year olds. However, if one pays the 3000 game points to Create a Horse of racing age, they are considered the breeder of that horse, and can therefore get a breeder award as soon as the horse wins a race.

CLAIMING INCOME
This is income you receive because of other players claiming horses from you. I know a lot of newish players are troubled by the idea of one of their horses being claimed -- and often avoid claiming races for that reason -- but usually it's an unnecessary concern. What's more, as the player inevitably has the experience of racing more and more mediocre horses as the years go by, they'll most likely learn to appreciate a horse being claimed from them, because the income from the claim is often more valuable than the horse.

EXCHANGE INCOME
This is for the new Exchange mechanism, where players anonymously trade game points for SIM cash, or vice versa. So, this income would represent any money you received from another player, in exchange for you giving them game points.

FEATURE RACE ARTICLE
This is money you receive for writing an article. Normally, an article will earn you $20,000, if it's at least 500 words. Shorter articles will pay less. Also, interviews normally pay $15,000. Writing articles is a great way to build up your bank balance, or otherwise keep yourself from going bankrupt. You don't need anyone's permission to write an article. The easiest thing to do, if you're bereft of ideas, is to simply select a stakes race (though it doesn't have to be a stakes race) and write a review, discussing the entries. Race previews used to be one of the most common types of articles, and now there's very few that are written. It would be nice to see them make a reappearance.

GELD
Gelding a colt earns you $1,000, but you get more than just the money. The Steward assures us that gelding *always* improves the horse, though admittedly such improvement might be to such a small degree that you really don't notice. Other times, however, gelding can bring about a significant improvement. So, once it becomes obvious that a colt isn't stud quality, one has nothing to lose and everything to gain by gelding him.

LEASE INCOME
This is money you receive for leasing your horses to other players. Prior to Year 41, one could only lease mares. Now, with SIM 6.0, we can also lease stallions and racehorses.

PENSIONER INCOME
When geldings are retired from racing, or stallions and broodmares retired from breeding, they are considered pensioned. The owner can then choose to give them a second career. Two such careers -- Eventers and Rodeo Horses -- can randomly earn prize money from competitions. The prize money is 10,000 for first, 7,500 for second, and 5,000 for third. These random drawings occur on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and you'll get an in-game message if any of your pensioned horses earn anything.

This might sound like an easy way to make passive income, but it's really difficult to win prize money. My pensioned horses now number some 600, and since the summer of 2011 -- nearly four real-life year ago -- my horses have earned a prize only 42 times. That might sound like a lot, but considering that there's two competitions a week, 16 weeks a game year, and how many rodeo and eventers I have, I only win a prize in about 10% of the competitions. Again, that's with hundreds of pensioners competing. Winning would surely occur significantly less often if I had say, only 20 horses competing.

When horses are pensioned, one no longer has to pay the daily $5 fee for them. But one does have to pay board, unless they have their own farm. Still, just one 5k third place prize would cover the annual board for 15 pensioned horses.

SELLING HORSES
This is money you receive from selling horse via any means except the claim box. With the AJ horses now costing 10k each, as of this year, I'm thinking that it will now be easier for players to sell mediocre horses cheap on the sales list.

When it comes to selling higher quality horses, I think advertising on the forum is the best way to go. It's the easiest way for buyers and sellers to find each other regarding a particular horse, and the fastest way to establish a price satisfactory to both.

STUD FEES
This is the income from standing stallions at stud. If you have the right stallion, he can be a literal gold mine, and earn his owner millions. However, stallions are an intensely competitive market, with many dozens to choose from, so a lot of stallions get ignored, even when they have top credentials to be successful. For example, I currently own a Baltimore Crown winner, and he gets almost no mares.

I know a lot of players are understandably enamored of the idea of owning a stallion, and earning stud fees. But simply standing a horse does not automatically mean the mares will come. A Thoroughbred stallion with less than a million in earnings is going to get lost amongst those that have earned multi millions. Therefore, without many mares being bred to him -- especially quality mares -- the stallion has little chance of coming up with a good foal that is going to get him noticed.

WINNINGS
Ironically, the last item under the income section is, far and away, the most important. Winnings are your purse earnings.

Purses for every race are distributed as follows:
1st Place - 50%
2nd Place - 22%
3rd Place - 10%
4th Place - 7%
5th Place - 2%

The remaining 9% is the breeder award.

I have lots of opinions on how to earn more purse money, and I've detailed strategies in various articles over the years. In a nutshell, it comes down to this: Purse money is always paid back to fifth place. The fewer horses you have to beat, the easier it is to earn purse money. The smaller fields you race in, the more purse money you're going to earn. While I wouldn't recommend entering one's better horses based upon field size, a focus on field size is a great strategy for average and lesser horses.

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