Personal Finance Games Simulations for All Ages

To start the path of financial education, it is very important to take into account several things. The first and most important of them is to be very aware of the income you have and above all to live within your means. Many times, you may want to access a certain lifestyle that, in the long run, can get out of hand and lead you to acquire debts that can be deferred for several years and even grow, thanks to the interest imposed by financial institutions. 

Personal Finance Games Simulations Teach You Budget

These personal finance games simulations will teach you how to administer an easy budget and be able to reach your financial goals.

The Fundamentals

To avoid the above, it is very important to organize your income, the creation of budgets, and strategies that allow you to make the money work, and above all not to waste, so as not to put your finances at risk.

Another fundamental point is to start with the habit of saving, important both for the fulfillment of short and long-term goals, as well as not to be unprepared for any inopportune event that may occur.

To prepare yourself, you can use personal finance games simulation or apps to get ahead. The idea behind these games and applications is the learning phase that participants experience in financial lessons and at the same time having a lot of fun. It makes learning faster and easier. Once all the fun is over, the participants will be able to walk away with something concrete to help them in their financial life. Let us jump into the various games that you can use to learn about personal finance.

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JubiGame

JubiGame is quite interactive and can be played from your computing device on the Internet. The game teaches participants how they can save for their retirement. The player has several virtual opportunities to reincarnate as various characters such as a cook, corporate executive, businessman or woman, mechanic, nurse or waiter; among other professions. Each virtual character has to contemplate a series of scenarios related to their lives such as gaining access to the local job market, giving birth to a child, having a wedding, or getting fired; among other events.

The game gives participants the tools and resources to make the appropriate investment and savings decision in the specific scenario with an inference to their retirement.

While playing the game, the participant will have to check on their status, such as their total savings, income and expenses, pension plan and its value, etc. There is a timeline in the game to show the participant the route to take to reach their goal in a given scenario or event. As their life journey progress, so does the calendar until they reach the age of retirement. You can click on the game at any time and stop it, then continue later on.

The objective is to get to the age of retirement and continue to maintain a standard of living that can help reach that goal.

The game also comes with contests that participants can play among themselves. There is always a winner who must reach the retirement goal and have savings stock for each scenario and character, allowing them to live on their retirement income for years. Participants will get extra points when they disseminate other participants in the game.

Cashflow 101

This is a board game created by Robert Kiyosaki, a well-known author of financial self-help manuals. The goal is to get out of the "rat race" and achieve the financial and vital goals that you have set for yourselves.

K´BBAN

This daily budget app seeks to transfer knowledge of financial mathematics, basic accounting, and economic principles, which players can apply to their daily lives to improve their financial situation.

The link it establishes between the real and the financial economy is especially interesting.

Ethica

This is one of the personal finance games simulations, which is designed to make people aware of the social and environmental impact of banking, investment, and business activities. Through the game, it is intended to change the mentality of people so that they make more responsible decisions.


Video Games

Video games are quite dominant and popular among individuals of all age groups. It is a great pastime, even though, it can become addictive. There are video games for different things such as financial education, role-playing, sports, and adventure. They come with various themes and can be played on different consoles and platforms such as mobile, computer, and laptop.

Image Source: EA

Most of them have as their main objective to entertain. Others, the least, seek directly to educate. They will not be books or movies, but in many cases, being targeted at economic and financial concepts and being able to put them into practice, even virtually, serves to leave you interesting lessons. In addition, with the rise of online platforms such as Steam or Gog, video games have been democratized, and there are already many titles at truly affordable prices. Below are some of them.

Simcity

One of the most emblematic video games that have created a school in its 28-year history and its more than a dozen sequels. The truth is that the impact of this game of creation, management, and evolution of cities has been enormous since its launch back in 1989.

Its main lesson is budget management, revenue management, and public spending, which almost all come from taxes and know how to spend them on services to the citizens of your virtual city.

It consists of creating, managing, and growing cities. Starting from scratch, the player must start, supply, and expand the city with the available budget, and provide its citizens with the basic services they require. The main source of income for the city is through the collection of taxes, which with the help of a team of specialists in different areas the player must make decisions as the city grows larger and more complex to keep the residents happy. In the more modern versions, other interesting concepts have been included, such as the discrimination of taxes by income levels, the purchase and sale of services, subcontracting, or even business.

Capitalism

Its name says it all: capitalism. Both the original game and its subsequent sequels, Capitalism Plus and Capitalism II have the same interesting mechanics that have made them the economic simulators par excellence. Through the game, you manage an entire business in multiple ways: vertically, integrating all facets of production, from the extraction or creation of the raw material, the manufacture and distribution of the product in general trade or specialized establishment, or just do it in some phase.

Within each of these phases, you will have R&D departments, in which surprisingly, you can create products of the future, such as smartphones (we must take into account the first game is from 1995), manage marketing, labeling, quality improvements, supplier changes and all this competing in different scenarios and rivals. Although it is not its strongest point, you can also manage the finances of the business, including loans, the possibility of investing in the stock market, and, even, the purchase of rival companies.

Civilization

Civilization, first released in 1991, is one of the best-known turn-based strategy game franchise. With six editions and more than a dozen expansion packs, its success is based on combining complexity and playability with a more than an attractive concept: taking one civilization to prevail over others from the Neolithic to the more recent future.

Of course, the economy is an important concept, but not so much in management, which is quite simplified, but in how they show you concepts, advances, innovations, and economic policies that have marked the social and economic development of humanity: from unions to corporations, from banking to the stock market, from commercialism to communism and capitalism. You get a whole lesson in policies and economic advances at the click of a button.

Virtonomics

The triumph of an amateur product that has managed to attract more than 600,000 players throughout the world, where economic and business management principles are practiced with other real players through a web platform. Through Virtonomics, you will control a corporation in all its aspects: from hiring and teaching staff, directing sales, buying raw materials, informing you about your competitors, improving the quality of your production, carrying out marketing and promotion tasks, signing cooperation agreements, and much more.


Managing Personal Finances

Image Source: EA

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Video games can prove to be a great way to learn and put into practice basic financial principles. In addition to doing it in a simple and fun way, they can give you great lessons about saving, since by imitating the real world they teach you through the game to manage your money to achieve your goals, to invest wisely, to manage your expenses, to do a budget and plan your future. 

Below are three video games. They are useful to learn how to manage your personal finances, and at the same time provide you with hours of entertainment.

  1. The Sims

      It is a life simulation video game where players create a character and design an entire community for the character to develop and meet all their personal needs. The game rewards players who work and live within their economical means, and who save to pay their expenses and bills that arrive in the mail. If they do not know how to manage their debts, they lose the assets that have been acquired during the game.


  2. Roller Coaster

      The player is given control to manage an amusement park and must achieve a goal, which can be from expanding the park to reaching a certain amount of money or benefits, and which must be achieved in a set time. In addition, the video game offers an introductory course on how to operate and manage the park, since the player will have to cover the expenses of advertising, maintenance, repairs, extensions, new attractions, employee salaries, among others.


  3. Capitalism II

      Through the game, you manage all the activities of a business. The player has an initial budget to start his business, with which he must contemplate all the operating expenses of the same as raw material, manufacturing, production, labeling, product distribution, marketing, quality control, suppliers, as well as management of the general finances of the business. The game also allows you to ask for loans, the possibility of investing in the stock market, and even buy from the competition.


Conclusion

Video games, although they are a virtual world, can teach you to value things, to be proactive with your resources, and to develop the ability to manage your finances in a fun and ingenious way. Learn from them and put them into practice in your daily life.

We all need help to get our finances in order and what better way than to use personal finance games simulations to get the job done. It is a learning process for many, and it will also give you a good idea of how finances work and how to get your financial goals accomplished.

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If you want to learn more about personal finances, visit the Goalry website and go ahead to the Budgetry, Debtry and other financial stores where you will find tons of information.