The life simulation
You are eighteen, you have a job, and you have seventy years to get through. Everything from the first five modules is in here, and none of it is labeled. There is no winning score and there is no rewind.
How it works
Each year you see what you are living on, what it costs, and what has come up. Some things happen to you. Some are offers, and you decide whether they are worth the money. What you choose to live in, drive, eat and how you show up at work are yours to set and they stay set until you change them.
The early years get more turns than the later ones. Nobody would finish seventy-two turns, and the years before your late thirties do more work than the years after them. From 38 onward, time runs in blocks. The shorter run squeezes both halves and keeps the same shape, so it never flattens your life into equal steps. When you stop working is your decision. The model does not make it.
Start a life
Every run has a number. The same number gives the same seventy years, so a class can all live the same life and compare, and a run that surprised you can be returned to instead of lost.
You start as a high school graduate with a job, living with family, no savings and no debt. Where it goes from there is yours.
Seventy years, thirty decisions, one run. There is no undo, and you can always start another life afterwards.
Who are you at eighteen
Three choices you cannot take back. None of them is wrong, all of them cost something, and you will be living with them for seventy years.
Who this is
Optional, and it stays in this browser. A name makes the seventy years easier to talk about afterwards.
After school you
How you get the degree
The same qualification at the end, so the same earnings in the wage table. What changes is what it costs to get there, and where you spend the first two years.
The work
They all start on the same pay. The measured data says so. Three things separate them: how far the ladder goes, how reliably the work is there, and whether the employer puts anything into your retirement.
Which state
This changes income tax and nothing else. States with no income tax generally raise the money through property tax instead, and this simulation holds property tax at a national average, along with house prices, rents and wages. So what you are comparing here is the income tax alone, not the full cost of living somewhere.
A single flat rate, applied to everything you earn. Useful if the rates here have aged, if your state changed them, or if you want to add a local income tax on top of nothing.
That is everything you cannot change later. The rest of it you can change on any turn, so it is set to something sensible and you can leave it alone.
Where you live, what you drive, how you spend Set for you. Change them now or on any turn.
Where you live
Getting around
Day to day
Age 18
Starting outWhat just happened
This year
How you are living
These stay as they are until you change them.
The people
The money
The same year, in both moneys
| The same year | In the dollars of the day | In today's money |
|---|
The rest stays as cash. Cash is there when something breaks; investments are there in thirty years. Module 3 covered why you want some of both.
Enter lives the year. 1 to 9 answer a card.
Stops the life at this age and goes to the end screen.
A life
What the life gathered
Seventy years, one thing at a time
All of it at once
Present your life
Four questions to answer about the run you just finished. Write as much or as little as you want. Everything you type is saved in this browser and written into the record you download, so this is the part a teacher can actually read.
There is no right answer to any of these, and the simulation is not marking them. The arithmetic can tell you what happened. Only you can say whether it was worth it.
The full analysis is below these questions, not above them: the market, the path you took, how an ordinary run compares and how much of yours was luck. Answer from what you remember first, then open it and see whether you were right.
Show me all of it Hide the analysis The market, the path you took, how an ordinary run compares, and how much of it was luck
The market, and what you had in it
Who you were
The path you took
Seventy years, left to right. The line is your life and its height is how well it was going. Every fork is a decision: the ones you took are on the path, the ones you let go branch away and stop.
Against an ordinary run
A number on its own does not tell you much. The bars below show where the middle half of six hundred other runs of this simulation landed, and where yours sat among them.
How much of that was the hand you were dealt
Some of what happened to you was decided by a number you picked before you started. This runs one fixed set of decisions on your life and on a hundred and twenty others: because the decisions never change, every difference between them is the draw.
What you did with it
You did these
You let these pass
Take it with you
A written record of the whole life: the setup, every year, what you took and what you let pass, and the figures at the end. Your name is typed here, kept in this browser, and written into a file you download. It is never sent anywhere, because there is nowhere for it to be sent.
The printed version is the short one: how the life ended, who you were, the path you took, how it compared, and what you wrote. Two or three pages.
One line carrying how it came out, and nothing else. Hand your teacher this instead of the whole record. Read it first. Every word of it is in plain sight before you give it to anybody.
Again
The same life number gives the same seventy years, so you can go back and take a different route through them. A different number is a different life entirely.