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Extra! I have just written an article From Baby to Young Adult: Your First 45 Days that is of special interest to young players (and those who love them... or just employ them).

My previous articles "Business Opportunities in 27 Countries" and "Finding and Funding Your New Business Plan" have provided some basic info on how to start a business, some pitfalls to beware, and some markets that might be promising. In this article, the newspaper will take a detour through "Home Economics," things which every player can do to get more money and to get more out of their money, before returning to business and other, more ambitious endeavors.

Previously I have published the "Making Money" portion of this two-part series on "Home Economics" in the eUK press. Now I have chosen to publish in eUkraine for the "Saving Money" part.



This article will look at saving money by (a) knowing what there is to buy and just buying less wastefully, (b) buying in marketplaces other than the local one for your citizen, (c) buying on the "black market" of sellers willing to trade by donation, and (d) buying when the product is cheaper and more abundant.

(A) Saving Money: Ways (Not) to Spend It

This is always a slightly ironic phrase because the best way to "save" money is, simply, not to spend it. The only way you can truly "save" on a purchase is if you were going to make that purchase regardless. Yet, how often do you get a coupon in the mail for your monthly rent or utilities?

In addition to the game options that require Gold to purchase, there are four consumable products and one durable product on the Marketplace: Food, Weapons, Gifts, Moving Tickets, and (the non-consumable good) Houses.

Food

The cheapest Food is Q1, obviously. Higher quality Food benefits you by providing more wellness gain at the end of the eRepublik day. Food combines with any House for the total end-of-day wellness effect, but Q1 food is the minimum to avoid losing wellness to starvation. See Wellness on the eRepublik wiki. For most players, most of the time, they can and probably should save money by buying Q1 Food only.

Soldiers are among those who are most justified in looking to buy very high Quality food because it provides a relatively cheap way to get wellness when compared to Gifts and Wellness Boxes. They can get more "bang for their buck" if they end the day closer to 50 wellness instead of 100 wellness. At 50 wellness food and housing provide the full effect, point-for-point as advertised, but as you approach 100 wellness, the effect of food and housing on wellness approaches half of the effect at wellness 50. For example, if you used Q2 food and a Q3 house, that would have +5 wellness as the benefit at 50 wellness (resulting in 55), but only a bit over +2.5 wellness as the benefit at 95 wellness (resulting in about 97.7).

Below 50 wellness, the effect is magnified, and, approaching 0 wellness, the effect approaches 1.5 times the sum of the quality of Food and House. This can make Food a very cost-effective part of nursing a character back to good health after its death, or just good for helping noobies get up to fighting wellness.

Weapons

Most players spend most of their disposable income on Weapons, and for good reason. Every time you use a Q1 Weapon instead of fighting bare-handed, the effect in damage is 2.4 times as great. The citizenry that digs into their pocket for Q1 guns will, by far, outdamage their enemies.

Not everyone can afford a full complement of 5 Q1 Weapons every day of a prolonged conflict. In this case, if you want to go for the highest amount of damage over several days, you are best advised to spread your purchases of Weapons evenly: instead of buying 4 Weapons one day and no Weapons the next, you would do more damage by buying and using 2 Weapons each day. This is because you do more damage when you are at higher Wellness--and the Weapon multiplies this base damage, which is higher for the first two fights of the day.

Higher quality weapons than Q1 are not usually recommended for most citizens. While a Q1 weapon does 2.4 times the damage of bare fists, using a Q2 weapon does only 2.8 times the damage of bare fists while costing about twice as much. Like food, for most players, most of the time, they can and probably should save money by buying Q1 Weapons only.

Gifts

These have several uses:

** They can be fun, to give and receive.
** They can be used to get hapless players up to 40 Wellness, at which point they can fight and use a Hospital.
** They can be used to get in an extra fight per day (for the well-funded soldier).

However, Gifts are usually more expensive than Food for Wellness gain, especially if you are ending your day around 50 Wellness. This means that anyone regularly using Gifts should look into using Food instead or using Gifts on top of using Food.

Self-gifting is most easily achieved by having an Organization (more on that later), but it can also be achieved by any combination of gift partners (asking for gifts back from friends who are online) or national gift exchanges (which may gift you back before the end of the eRepublik day).

Moving Tickets

This has one use:

** Going somewhere (as a citizen or Organization) in a country not at war with the one you are in.
** Losing 2 wellness (as a citizen) at the same time.

Nobody at the present time seems to be taking real advantage of the ability to mitigate or even add wellness with higher quality Moving Tickets.

Since everybody will eventually move somewhere, it doesn't hurt (much) to have a couple Moving Tickets in your inventory prior to the time you will actually need them. Buy them when they are reasonable (which means below 0.2 Gold per ticket, roughly). Prices tend to spike a little during congressional elections (the 25th) and can go even higher during times of mass migration (e.g., conquered regions being evacuated and resistance fighters moving into position).

Houses

This has one use. The Quality of your House combines with the Quality of the Food you purchased that day to provide a sum of Qualities used to compute the amount of wellness gain you receive at the end of the day. While you can be homeless, Q1 Food is necessary to get any benefit from either. The House, unlike the Food, is not consumed. It can be traded through donation. It does move with you when you change regions.

Practically, however, the House is bought by different players for different reasons, such as:

** The noobie feels as though he or she should not be homeless, on principle, and purchases a Q1 or Q2 House or even saves up for a better one than that.
** The veteran feels as though the House can be a trophy of achievement and purchases a Q5 House.
** The penny-pincher feels as though the House can be an investment and purchases a Q3 House to go with Q1 Food and negate Wellness lost to training and working at a Q1 company.
** The soldier feels as though he needs every edge in the battle for Wellness, and the House along with Food and Gifts are all cheaper than Wellness Boxes (the 2 gold packs for 10 wellness). So he purchases the best he can afford.

All of these arguments have some validity, but the last two have more validity in terms of objectively-real game mechanics. If you had been purchasing higher Quality Food or Gifts to maintain Wellness and a House will help you reduce those purchases over time, it can be viewed as an investment with a legit ROI. If you need every edge to get as many fights as possible in relative to your resources, then a Q5 House seems natural before you go buying too many Wellness boxes.

The best way to save money on a House, however, is never to buy one. The true penny-pincher would accept moderate Wellness loss over time and just fight one less than 5 times a day every so often. That would allow them to invest the Gold into something that creates more wealth for them. (One could argue for a "compromise" penny pincher who wants the experience and damage gain from 5 fights each day and is willing to pay for it, I suppose.) That leaves only the soldier with a very practical reason, rooted in game mechanics, for buying the House.



(😎 Saving Money: Get Organized!

The best way to save on Manufacture products such as Gifts and Food is not to look only at your local market. At a one-time cost to start of 5 Gold, an Organization can save you money in the long term when used correctly.

The Organization can be placed in any region of your choosing when you create it. This means you can save a Moving Ticket and research where you want to place it ahead of time. Look at your main expenses for which you use the Marketplace--whether that is Food, Gifts, Weapons, or even Moving Tickets--and place your Organization in a country which consistently has the product at the Quality levels you purchase in good number and at good prices. Since moving an Organization can be expensive relative to what you save, it's important to get this "close" to the best possible but not to ignore potential problems such as erratic pricing or low supply.

From then on, simply send money to your Organization and send back Food or Weapons or gift yourself, you've earned it! You can also store items not immediately needed (especially Weapons and Food) on your Organization. Also, an Organization can be used down the road for holding a business, so it really has lots of uses.



What If They Don't Take American Express?

You're going to have to learn how to use the monetary market before you can use an Organization to save money, if not sooner.

You can find it by selecting "Monetary Market" from the "Market" tab. You can always buy currency with your Gold account and see all the offers of currency for Gold in any country. It is not obvious, but happens to be true, that you can't see offers of Gold for currency unless you already have that currency. You can get around this by buying one hundredth (0.01) of the currency first.

The kind of patience required for many of the tactics described in these articles would be entirely dissonant with the personality that uses the "front page" of offers listing currency for your Gold. Unless the price of the currency is going to go up very soon or there is some fluke, it is always better to place your Gold for sale on the reverse page and wait for the currency to arrive sometime later. You will simply get more currency out of your Gold; or, equivalently, it will take less Gold to get the required currency.

This isn't even a monetary market trick for making money. Think of it, rather, as cutting out the middleman (the currency broker) in do-it-yourself fashion. If you ever are a currency broker, you will find out that the hardest part of the job is moving the currency and making it into Gold. If you already have the Gold, why not do the easy part yourself?



(C) Saving Money: Once You Go Black...

There are several persons and groups who are willing to sell you goods on the "Black Market." This sounds a bit more sinister than it really is. Usually it means that you donate money, typically Gold, to the person's Organization, while they send you the product they have in their inventory to you by donation. This is most popularly done for Weapons, the game's largest industry, and Houses, the game's largest one-off consumer purchase.

Several offers for Weapons and other trades of Manufacture products can be found in the forum under "Other Announcements." Housing sales are also there and have spread like a weed to the "Hospital and Defense System" forum as well.

The prices are usually at or below the world's cheapest Marketplace offer, and you don't even have to move your Organization to buy. The low prices are especially evident in the case of Houses, which can be sold by the owner after using it for a while, whether that sale is direct to its next owner or instead to a Houses broker, who makes a living on the price cut that people will take for convenience of selling fast.

What's the catch of using the black market? Risk is the main catch, with a few unscrupulous individuals making things a little less fun. Try to look for a positive history of successful transactions before doing business with any citizen or Organization in a way that puts you at risk (i.e., that involves you sending money first). Also, if it sounds too good to be true, it just might be. It's better to be a bit safer and pay a little premium than to be out all your money with nothing to show for it.



Why Not Support Local Industry?

There is always going to be a large portion of the population who feels that they should always support local enterprise and local workers. There is nothing inherently wrong with that sentiment. However, I would present to you a few more considerations.

(1) If prices are really out of control in your country, you are allowing large profits for persons whom you may not really know so well, while at the same time keeping prices high for your fellow countrymen (and women) who may not even consider the options.
(2) If you buy from a person or a country with whom you believe there is good relations with you or with your country, the "karmic loss" in your transaction is perhaps softened as compared to buying from an outright enemy of your nation.
(3) For those in wealthy countries due to High resources where everybody is paid well, you are helping workers in countries without those resources to be paid just a little bit better.

At the same time, I am not saying there is never a place for buying with patriotism in mind. Only you can make that choice.



(D) Saving Money: When the Time is Right

As I hinted in the section about Moving Tickets, prices fluctuate even within markets, as well as globally, depending on the events and purchasing / production habits of citizens at that time. You can save a lot of money by buying when prices are low. Large-scale and protracted war is the greatest force for increasing the costs of Weapons as well as, to some extent, Gifts and Moving Tickets. Purchasing high-quality Weapons or other items when prices are cheap can save you a lot of money.

Even within a war, prices on Weapons of every quality spike during very important battles. Take special care to have a cache of Weapons ready to avoid being gouged on prices.

The best way to save money on a House is just to wait until a buyer is desperate to unload it fast... and to have the cash in hand to pay him for it right then. Incidentally, that is also the best way to save money on business acquisition.

That's All, Folks!


(Yes, the more votes this article gets, the lower prices will get. The monkey says so!)

Please also subscribe if you'd like to read more articles like this one. This newspaper is dedicated to articles on money, business, and charts-and-graphs statistics-type stuff. I try to leave politics at the door; or, rather, in my citizen's paper.

Be sure to look at previous articles for more interesting info on economics, business, and more.

Until next time, have fun, and stay safe!