Quick Start · Part 6 · About 4 minutes
Keeping the fund alive
Your starting fund is the largest sum you will ever hold at once. Everything after it has to be earned — and the thing that earns it is not building, but being useful.
Where the money comes from
Four kinds of inflow, and they are not equally interesting:
- Recurring support
- Government grants and policy contributions. They repeat while their conditions hold.
- Earned revenue
- A population tax from people your network serves, plus tolls and fares. This is the one that grows with what you build.
- One-time funding
- Milestone awards and development support when GDP per person crosses a threshold. Welcome, but small against your fund.
- Loans
- Cash now, obligations later. Not income.
The second row is the whole game. Population tax is service-linked: an unconnected settlement contributes nothing, and a connected but badly served one contributes less than an equally large well-served neighbour. Population is not a payment you receive for existing — it is a measure of how many people your network is actually supporting.
That is why the habit from Part 1 pays twice. Serving real demand does not only fill your roads; it is how the country starts paying you.
What never stops
Construction is a single visible payment. Everything else is a subscription:
- Maintenance on every road, track, station, airport and terminal, every month, whether used or not.
- Operating cost on every active rail line and sailing.
- Depreciation, which reduces your reported result without taking cash.
- Loan payments, once you have borrowed.
One of these is not like the others: depreciation never takes cash out of your fund — it only lowers the reported result. The money you actually lose each month is maintenance, operating cost and loan payments.
The first two are why an over-built network kills a nation slowly. You do not notice the month you built too much; you notice it two years later.
Why a good month can still drain the fund
The single most confusing thing in the early game: the reported result and the fund do not move together.
Includes non-cash entries such as depreciation. It tells you whether the network is viable.
Moves with cash only — construction, loan principal, real receipts. It tells you whether you can act.
A nation can post positive net income while its fund falls every month, because loan principal and capital spending take cash without appearing in the result. If the two disagree, trust the fund for whether you can build, and the result for whether you should have.
Borrowing, briefly
Loans run for 5, 10, 20 or 30 years with equal monthly payments, and the interest rate is set by your development level at the moment you borrow — then fixed for the life of the loan.
That last detail is the beginner-relevant one: early loans are expensive, and the same borrowing one development stage later can cost a fraction of the interest. Borrow early only for something that will start earning quickly. If a project can wait and you are still poor, waiting is itself a financial decision.
The check before every build
One habit, worth more than any single decision:
Read the monthly net
Not the fund balance — the direction it is moving. A large fund draining steadily is a worse position than a small one holding level.
Add the new monthly cost
Every build quote carries a permanent maintenance figure. Ask whether the monthly net survives it, not whether the fund covers the construction.
Then decide
If the answer is no, the project is not unaffordable — it is early. Build something that earns first.
Affording the construction is the easy test. Affording the road for the next fifty years is the real one.
Next
Part 7 is the city layer — a whole second half of the game where none of this money applies.
For the full picture, the Economy collection starts at How the economy fits together, with Loans and financial resilience on borrowing.