Version 1.4.1: Your Mortgage Now Has an End Date
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Until 1.4.1, a mortgage in Moneyflow was a lifelong companion: you paid the interest and the principal sat there, waiting for you to deal with it. Real mortgages come with a schedule and an end date, and so, at last, do ours.
Mortgages and business loans repay themselves
A mortgage now starts gently, with a short stretch of interest-only paydays. Then the payment steps up to include principal, and the loan pays itself down over many years until it closes and drops out of your expenses. A business purchase loan works the same way over a shorter stretch. Car loans, from the new-car card and from the loans some careers start with, repay from the very first payday. We adjusted the starting expenses of those careers to match.
You see the step-up before you commit. A financed property card now shows the payment for the interest-only stretch and the payment after it, with the net cashflow at both stages. The figure for after the step-up has its own colour, so a deal that looks green today and turns red in a few paydays can no longer hide behind the first number.
Bank loans: interest only, repay when you like
Loans from the Borrow button and from bank cards now charge interest only, and you repay the principal from the Pay menu whenever you choose. Pay is how that principal comes down, and the Pay menu and your statement tag these loans "interest only · repay from Pay" so you do not forget. It is a lovely arrangement, up to the point where you notice you still owe all of it.
The bank is not fooled by a low payment. When it decides whether you can afford a loan, it still counts the principal, and it looks at all of your loan payments together. The limit it applies to your income is more relaxed than before. Purchase loans, such as a mortgage, a bridge loan or margin, and borrowing against an asset can still pass on how much of your assets is borrowed, even when your income is stretched.
The meter and the warnings tell the truth
The Debt Burden meter now counts the payments you are actually committed to, including the step-up that is coming. The warnings on the board scale with the limits instead of using fixed figures. When the bank says no, the message says how much of your income the payments would take and which limit you ran into, instead of a vague refusal. The Rules page was rewritten to explain underwriting, loan terms, debt burden and leverage in one place, and it always shows the limits the game really uses.
The Bridge Loan and Leveraged Buyout buttons also show the cashflow after the mortgage steps up, as the card does. And refinancing is fairer. A loan with a repayment schedule is now re-priced for what remains, instead of the end of it being quietly forgiven, and refinancing an interest-only bank loan lowers its rate instead of just trimming the payment. Banks do not forgive things, and neither should we.
Two houses, one name
Loans used to be tied to an asset by its name alone. If you owned two lots with the same name, selling one paid off the loans on both, which was generous of us and a little unfair to the bank. Every lot now has its own identity, and every loan secured on it remembers which lot it belongs to. Saved games and games in progress are matched up automatically, in the order the lots were bought.
Multiplayer: tap a name, see their books
In multiplayer, tap a player's name in the turn bar or the Players panel to open a read-only financial statement for that player. Tap your own name and you get yours. It is the polite way to find out whether the person on a winning streak is clever or just heavily leveraged. We also stopped the board's dice from rolling the first move on their own when a match starts.
A news card, a Store button and a few more languages
The home screen has a dismissible news card above the buttons. The first one tells you that animated pawns are here, with the Dragon, the Shark and the Tiger on show. See the pawns takes you straight to the pawns in the Store, and there is a new Store button under Play vs Bots, for everyone who had never found the old way in. The card follows your theme's gold, and the footer on the landing page now wraps on phones instead of losing a link off the edge.
The Store, Daily quest and Stats screens had been in English whatever language you played in. They now speak all fourteen languages, and so do the loan rules above. The finance strip clips a long label with an ellipsis instead of running into its neighbour, and the game no longer says "1 cards" or "1 rolls".
Next in the series is 1.4.2, which followed less than twenty minutes later.
The release notes, word for word
The store listing keeps a single set of notes for the 1.4 releases. The loan rules were added to it for this version, so it now reads as follows.
New Pro bots plan every move, and every bot can now buy dreams, win and borrow against its assets. Interest rates follow the boom-and-bust cycle, recessions cut your taxes, and rents rise in a boom and slip in a recession. Selling an asset pays off its loans. Mortgages now repay over 25 years, business loans over 15, car loans over 6; bank loans are interest-only, up to 67% of income. Finance a baby, buy IPO shares as far as your cash goes. Hotel and Motel rebalanced. Now in 8 more languages.
Play it now
Moneyflow is free on the App Store, free on Google Play and free in any browser. There are no ads, and you do not need an account to start.