When Alex Recker and his wife Marissa needed to get their household budget under control, they didn’t go to a financial planner. They went to a video game.
Blogging about the difficulties the couple had keeping track of where their money was going every month, Recker tried a bunch of custom household budget services and found all of them lacking.
Then one night while playing Civilization V, and going over his Civ’s finances (which in the game are presented in a clear and concise way at all times), he had a eureka moment.
One night while we playing I sleepily remarked how I wish we could see a breakdown like that for our money. I elaborated on how cool it would be if we could pay our bills this way. I was tired of trying to assess how we were doing financially while our account balance was jumping around so dramatically month to month. I wished instead that money could come in and go out more consistently – like water draining from a faucet.
That got me thinking – what is stopping us from finding out how much money we are making daily ? If our life were a Civ game, how much “gold” would we be making every “turn”?
Essentially, he built a spreadsheet that broke down his weekly and monthly costs and calculated how much money he and his wife were spending every day. He did the same to his income, meaning that every single day — just like Civilisation shows you every turn — he could see whether he’d lost or saved money.
To illustrate this, here’s Civ V’s at-a-glance economy breakdown, which shows a general summary of all your cash coming in and going out.
And here’s a small part of Alex’s budget, which does the same thing to his own ongoing expenses:
After a while, he was able to plot how well he was doing every “turn”.
A lot of people do roughly similar things — my own household runs on breaking down every expense into weekly blocks — but I’ve never seen one become so granular that it’s done every day. But hey, if it works for an entire Civilization’s economy over thousands of years (and was designed that way by professionals), then of course it can also work for Alex and Marissa.
If you want to dig deeper into their plans, you can see the code and complete breakdown here.
Comments
10 responses to “Civilization Saved This Couple’s Money”
economic victory?
It was going well too until Shaka Zulu denounced him.
Or until Gandhi nuke him
Before I read the story I assumed it was saving their money by consuming their entire lives, so they didn’t need to spend money on going out to eat or on socializing or on personal hygiene products, etc.
Get out of my head please 😉
How… how is creating a budget balance sheet turning to Civ 5?
Protip: The answer is in the article 🙂
Sounds like he didn’t know how to make a balance sheet. So he copied the game.
So he created a budget spreadsheet, has tenuous link to gaming, becomes Kotaku story….Seriously this is just click bait and pretty pointless.
Well, I also have never heard of someone budgeting their lives by the day, I myself budget by the month (although really I should be budgeting per fortnight), and I’m pretty lazy about it. Generally only look at it if I’m about to make a large purchase and I’m not 100% sure if I can actually afford it or not.
I kind of relate to the article though, I feel like my own economic strategy was kick started thanks to EVE Online, it sort of opened my eyes and showed me how I should look at careers and income and how I should go about things. Haven’t really fully met all my goals yet but hopefully I should be rolling in money by the time I’m 30. That’s the idea anyway.
Look on the bright side – it could have been another UFC article.