After playing The Sims as a kid, I spent my early adulthood fruitlessly chasing the ‘rosebud’ cheatcode to wealth

• I played The Sims when I was a kid, and it taught me some twisted lessons about money.
• I used the ‘rosebud’ cheatcode to make my Sims wealthy without working, and I kept looking for the same cheatcode in real life.
• Now that I’m older, I realize building wealth isn’t the same as the instant gratification of entering the ‘rosebud’ cheat.
• Read more stories from Personal Finance Insider.

After a long day at school and a torturous hour sitting in Manila traffic on the way home, all I wanted to do as a little kid was turn my computer back on and resume last night’s riveting game of The Sims.

For those of you who have never built a home in the virtual land of SimCity, let me explain. The Sims is a life simulation computer game where you could make your own characters (aka Sims), build their homes, and manage their finances.

I probably spent two or three hours every night on the game, creating queer families with two, three, sometimes four parents in the household. Since I went to Catholic school and grew up in a religious family, The Sims was a safe space to explore my identity.

Additionally, The Sims was one of the first places where I learned about money — how it would feel to spend and splurge on whatever I wanted, and how poor money management could affect my Sims’ lives.

In the original Sims game, families had to pay their bills every three days, and failure to pay bills on time would result in a decline in your Sim’s mood. In later versions, a repo-man would come to collect items from the Sims’ home if they didn’t pay their bills on time.

This fun game seemed innocent enough, but it taught me so many twisted lessons about money.

I romanticized the idea of cheating my way into wealth

Aside from basic financial management, I learned about the ‘rosebud’ cheatcode. Coupled with extra exclamation points and semicolons, the ‘rosebud’ cheatcode could put millions of simoleons (Sim dollars) into my Sims’ bank accounts. Sometimes, the code caused my poor old computer to crash, or it took forever to load.

But I’ll never forget the serotonin boost of seeing all that money in my account and letting my unhinged Sims run wild with this newfound free time.

Subconsciously, I figured that there’s probably a way to do this in real life — some kind of cheatcode that would allow me never to work again. Of course, as I got older, I learned that the “cheatcode” to wealth is often theft, fraud, or exploitation of resources that will help you get rich overnight.

I spent my adulthood chasing the ‘rosebud’ cheatcode to wealth

In my early 20s, I attended an elite art school where people could afford to pay six figures of college tuition out of pocket and take unpaid internships. I watched my fellow unpaid interns eat $25 lunches everyday and go back to their Manhattan apartments funded by mom and dad, while I ate a $5 plate from the halal cart and crashed at my aunt’s house in Queens.

I thought their families found the ‘rosebud’ cheatcode to wealth, and I was desperate to figure out how to do the same thing. Instead of actually taking care of my financial health, I ended up making poor financial decisions to catch up with my rich friends.

Sure, I was able to go to oyster happy hour with them, sip expensive Champagne, and “network” with important people in the industry. But unlike everyone else, I was charging my share of the bill on a credit card with high interest rates while they paid in cash without blinking an eye at their account balances.

There is no cheatcode to wealth

Now that I’m in my 30s, I know that wealth isn’t just seeing an astronomically high number in your bank account. Wealth is not instant gratification, but a feeling of having enough to take care of myself in the long run, created by daily habits and awareness of my money.

I learned that there are lots of ways to make passive income, or grow your money exponentially by investing in stocks or cryptocurrency, that can feel a little bit like the ‘rosebud’ cheat. But even those sources of passive income require knowledge, diligence, and patience. 

Contrary to subconscious messaging from The Sims, there is no cheatcode to wealth that’s going to magically erase all my debt, pluck me from my daily work duties, or fix all my money problems.  All I can do is take small, consistent steps toward financial freedom every day.