I’ve split my plan into three sections depending on how fat my wallet is as each part involves different tactics to grow wealth. The more capital someone has the more options they tend to have available to them to grow it.
All stages can be approximately applied to the real world to help grow your money, the main difference between Neopets and real life seems to be how quickly each stage progresses. In Neopets something that can take a few days could take months or years to achieve in the real world.
Start
- Work – If you have no money or knowledge one of the best options available to most people is to get a job, in Neopets I’ll spend time playing games and submitting my scores to get some starting funds. Its slow but in the beginning there aren’t many other options.
- Learn – To improve my earnings I need to read forums for tips from other players who have made it to the top. I need to test and trial methods myself to figure out what works and what doesn’t. Without active research I’m going to be stuck at the starting line for a long time.
- Invest – At the start the main investment vehicle is the in-game bank. It doesn’t give much interest but its better than nothing.
- Don’t develop expensive habits – Its be hard to become rich if you develop expensive hobbies *cough *Neo stamp collecting*cough*
stamp collecting – neopets Starting the Snowy Valley page
Mid game
- Learn – Once my funds start growing I can afford to start learning about other money making methods not available to poorer Neopians, Such as reselling from other shops or buying high value items from the auction house to sell on at a profit.
- Cut Back on Games – A lot of the games have a very bad money/time ratio. At the start you have to take whatever work you can get. But once the value of your time starts rising it makes sense to cut back on tasks with low rewards. The real world equivalent I can think of would be online surveys and tasks that pay £1-£2 per hour!
- Keep investing – This involves the stock market, the bank, training your pet and upgrading your shop to hold more items from auctions/reselling.
Late Game
- Learn – The learning never stops, Neopets is so large that there will always be new methods for making money or ways to make existing methods more efficient.
- Stop almost all games – At this stage I will be making so much money from investments that games become very bad value for time. There is no need to spend an hour earning 20k NP when I can just collect interest interesting from the bank for that amount in seconds!
- Invest in bigger, longer term ideas – If you have the money then investing in rare items that you can hold for months before reselling can generate a lot of money for little effort. This is probably best avoided unless you have 10+ million NP to avoid cash flow issues if the items sell slower than expected.
I’ll likely come back and adjust these rules as I go through them with the benefit of hindsight, but for now these are the basics I will be following.