Simlish Credit-Worthiness

In my game, my sims have had it too easy to get loans. I've basically given any sim a loan that needed one. Since I want more financial variety in my game and some difficulty, I've decided to create a simlish credit-worthiness score and alter my existing loan calculators.

Credit-worthiness score (CWS) is based on personality and money interest. So a sim could change their score by increasing their money interest, so it's not always bad news for a sim that happened to have a personality type that scares bankers.

The score is:

   #neat points  + #money interest points  -  #playful points

Since I like to work with integers, I divide this score by 20 (the max score) and multiple by 100. 

Then to avoid negative numbers I add 50. 

Thus my scores can range from 0 to 150.

So the final calculation is 

|   #neat points  + #money interest points  -  #playful points   |                 |

|----------------------------------------------------------------------   |     * 100   |        + 50

|                                   20                                                         |                 |

Let's look at some examples:

Bill Carr has 10 neat points + 5 money interest - 0 playful points. His CW score is 125. One of the highest in my hood.

Alphonso Pentragnani has 2 neat points + 0 money interest - 6 playful points for a CW score of 30, one of the lowest in my hood.

Loan Calculators
I have altered my existing loan calculators and divided them into three types: mortgage loans, business loans and educational loans. I figure bankers would have various amounts of risk with each type of loan, for instance a higher default rate on business loans as opposed to educational loans. I still allow students to obtain educational loans regardless of credit-worthiness, so I will only be talking about business and mortgage loans.

Both loans require three pieces of information: salary, credit-worthiness score, and existing debt amount.

I wanted there to be three bands of credit-worthiness: poor, fair and excellent. Each has its own band score.

                                           

	Single Borrower	Couple Borrower	Mortgage Band Score
Poor	less than 50	less than 100	25
Fair	50-100	100-200	50
Excellent	greater than 100	greater than 200	75

My mortgage loans are equal to:

[total salary*mortgage band score]-0.25(prior debt)

rounded to the nearest thousand.


My business loans are harder to get and are often smaller. Also since it's possible for their to be multiple partners in a business, if there are more than 2 partners, then I'll divide the total score by the number of partners and use the Single Borrower Band Score.

	Single Borrower	Couple Borrower	Business Band Score
Poor	less than 50	less than 100	15
Fair	50-100	100-200	25
Excellent	greater than 100	greater than 200	50

My business loans are equal to:

[total salary*business band score]-0.3(prior debt)

rounded to the nearest thousand.

If you wanted to customize the loans for your hood it's easier to change the band scores to fit your hood. In Apple Valley most of my homes are tiny and thus cheap, so the average house value is about 35000, but most of my tiny starter homes can be brought for 13000 total. 

For the loan calculators, this is only the max amount the bank would loan , so like a pre-qualification. The sim doesn't have to take out such a large loan of course.
Example in Action

Usually examples are easier to follow than raw numbers, so let's look at Amanda and Elliot, two graduates who would love to buy a house, but have large student loans to pay back. Amanda has a CW score of 40 and Elliot has a score of 55, so together a score of 95. Together they have 30,000 in student loans and currently make a combined salary of $926.

Their mortgage approval amount would be

[926*25]-0.25(30,000) = $16,000

so not a lot to buy a house. But if they pay off all their student loans, they could get $23,000.

That's still a small amount and would require them to have a large down payment. It is looking pretty bleak for our couple, however I did say that you could change your CW score (both up and down).

They could take "financial counseling classes" and raise their money interest scores to a maximum of 10 points each, which would skyrocket their CW scores from 55 to 105 for Elliot and from 40 to 85 for Amanda, so 190 combined. This alone would increase their mortgage approval amount to $39,000 without paying student loans off and $46,000 if they pay their student loans in full.

From this example you can see that the CW score matters more in my loan calculators than prior debt since if Elliot and Amanda increased their CW scores to the maximum possible they could more than double the mortgage amount available to them-regardless of their large prior debt.

Tell me what you think, I would love to hear your thoughts.

EDIT: I added special benefits to my mortgage calculator.

Military Service
If a sim is a military sim, or veteran, then they get an extra 10x their total salary added to the loan amount (so if they are making $770 in the service, the get an extra $7700 added to the loan, which rounded up to nearest $1000 is $8000). I might add extra benefits as I encounter them.