3 Lessons World Of Warcraft Taught Me About Money Management Part 3

September 1st, 2008 BTG Posted in Saving/Retirement, Videogame Tuesdays |

Part 1 - Don’t Neglect Your Professions - Part 2 - One Crunchy Serpent At A Time -

3) Don’t touch your gold!

Seriously, I don’t care how badly you need gems in those sockets, don’t touch the gold you make from any of your professions: that is earmarked for your savings goal, your epic flying mount.

Quest for some extra cash if you need gold for other things, but the effort you put into earning the gold for your savings goal should be used for that savings gola and nothing else.

It’s a very simple problem: if you have it, you’ll find a way to spend it. Fortunately, this problem has a very simple solution: the best thing to do, whether in game or in reality, is to make sure you can’t easily access the funds you are saving.

In World Of Warcraft, any gold your character earns is always kept on their person: it can be used anywhere and you always have your total amount with you. This gets very very tempting when you see an expensive new tome (coughcoughPolymorph: Turtlecoughcough) and are carrying 3500 gold you’re trying to save for your mount. Smart players have found a way to avoid this temptation: they make sure they cannot touch it by sending it to another player they control (what I’ll be referring to as an “alt”).

This is CrazyInsane. She’s a level 41 Undead Warrior (hence, she has no brain), and she is holding all of Chainface’s hard earned gold, so that Chainface isn’t tempted to spend it.

Sending most of your money to an alt makes it easy to avoid the temptation of spending it: you won’t have it, the alt will. You will have to physically log out and log in as that different character, find a mailbox, mail it back to yourself, log out, then log back in as your original character just to have access to your savings. It’s not as difficult as I’m making it sound, but the advantage is that it should give you enough time to question whether or not you really want to blow your savings.

You can do the same thing in real life by setting up a specific account for your savings goal, one which is seperate form your main bank account. You may want to consider some of the online banks for this: they often offer higher interest rates, little or no fees to use the account, and it can sometimes be difficult to transfer money from the account (it can take days with some banks). These online banks make it very easy to transfer money from your main account, and most will even offer to make this automatic for you. You won’t even have to think about saving!

I like ING, but there are many competitiors out there who I’m sure do just as good a job. You can read my article about how to set up ING sub accounts for specific savings goals here. Remember, always do your research before making a descision, this includes shopping around for a bank account that suits you!

Conclusion:

So after some 4-6 weeks of grinding, mining, and cooking, one day I logged into CrazyInsane, and found the following in her backpack:

Woo Hoo! 5200 gold! Now I can get that sweet epic mount! But first I have to send it to Chainface. Remember I had CrazyInsane hold Chainface’s gold so that she couldn’t spend it.

One quick letter from crazy to chainface later and…Ah that’s better!