Money issues early game

[optOut]

Normal difficulty. I don't know how it happened. On my third, story vehicle and the money dried up. No doubt I bought some things I didn't need and sold some things that didn't need to be replaced (thus required buying new parts of said things). At no point did it seem like I was making egregious errors. Just simple mistakes here and there like, oops I bought a couple extra brake rotors and maybe sold some spark plugs that weren't extra. Before I know it, I don't have the cash to repair the car in my shop.

No big deal right? I'll just start the game over, sigh. Probably won't make the same mistakes again. Let the beatings continue until early game budgeting is solved.

[dancz28]

What you can do instead of restarting is sell parts off the car you are trying to repair and take another job and fix it to make money. Keep doing jobs and making money until you have more than enough to buy back the parts you sold to fix the car you sold the parts from. Either that or you could cheat and just add yourself money.

[optOut]

Had to nearly scrap all the things from a Nissan Nismo to fix my budget. The Nismo customer just wants new fluids and filters.

That third story-line car btw... wow. So many undiscovered parts. I practically disassembled ALL the things. Examination mode does nothing for revealing bad bushings and rod caps. Anyhow... I think I can dig myself out of this hole, so long as customers don't come back early to check up on things.

[Cap'n Jack Sparrow]

I have had same problem. Had to restart game twice on two new saves. Plus I made the additional mistake of starting them in expert difficulty mode. Thought that was no biggy problem, I get double XP points for it. Still having money issues. I just posted my dire straights on mission 12. The problem for me I have alread had to salvage parts from two other cars that are NON story mission jobs. I have not managed to buy back the parts for them yet. Plus I thought buying the VW Bora or Katagiri Matsumoto from the Junkyard for cheap would of helped me some more but it hasn't. I still need to find money for body panels and interior before I can make a profit off of that car even. I have 3616 credits left with a Porsche 911 and Pagani Huayra to find half of the engine parts and some chassis parts. I am in deep doodoo fudged it big time and I don't see a way out. I think the game early on needs to pay a little more for some of the story jobs. Because we are running out of money somehow ! And I don't have enough money for 100000 Test Path right now. One car I have figured out paya well for chasis and body is the Supa Toyota Supra.

[SkinGravel]

Originally posted by Cap'n Jack Sparrow:

I have had same problem. Had to restart game twice on two new saves. Plus I made the additional mistake of starting them in expert difficulty mode. Thought that was no biggy problem, I get double XP points for it. Still having money issues. I just posted my dire straights on mission 12. The problem for me I have alread had to salvage parts from two other cars that are NON story mission jobs. I have not managed to buy back the parts for them yet. Plus I thought buying the VW Bora or Katagiri Matsumoto from the Junkyard for cheap would of helped me some more but it hasn't. I still need to find money for body panels and interior before I can make a profit off of that car even. I have 3616 credits left with a Porsche 911 and Pagani Huayra to find half of the engine parts and some chassis parts. I am in deep doodoo fudged it big time and I don't see a way out. I think the game early on needs to pay a little more for some of the story jobs. Because we are running out of money somehow ! And I don't have enough money for 100000 Test Path right now. One car I have figured out paya well for chasis and body is the Supa Toyota Supra.

It's all about the grind, if you're playing straight. That's it. Make more money. Even if it's changing fluids.

[SkinGravel]

Do you mean jobs, or restoration?

[SkinGravel]

If you don't mind, let's go back to your thread so we don't blow up this one, since optOut marked this as solved.

[d_Flame]

Had the same problem. But I've solved it via doing some jobs of "other tasks". I did a lot of fluid changes only. Then, I've moved to gearbox problems, keeping consistancy on those jobs until I had enough money to do more complicated ones. Those gave me even more money.
It's slow, because you have to discard jobs and wait until the one you need appears, but, that's better than starting over, in my opinion. Good luck!

[hbarudi]

The problem I found was focusing entirely on story repairs, I have done mostly random orders and still struggled with low money and had to sell some inventory until that one random customer with an FMW car paid me 35,000 for the repairs. Then later I did a full restore of a junkyard car and doing full restores is best way to make money pushing the game forward. Now I still have unfinished story orders, but I can now afford to give them "luxury" treatment by full restore their cars.

[Cap'n Jack Sparrow]

Me too I finally now doing well on this 2nd save playthrough on expert mode. I am figuring out how best to do everything. I have had nearly 200,000K now by buying junkyard cars for between 4K, 8K or 12K and getting 40-60K profit. At the moment I am down to 116K but I have almost fully rebuilt a salem fastback with the blower, and a reptilia S2 all at the same time. I managed to get rid of the nearly 3 normal job order cars depressing me when I took all their parts one by one, those normal jobs didn't pay well, only giving couple of grand each, but now I only have the Pagani Huayra to do. I have a feeling I am going to pay more to put the Huarya back together too and not get much back. But hey ho, that is what happens when you go and take a normal job and start taking all the cars parts. Sooner or later you are going to have to buy all the parts back and not get much back return but they do save you in the end. I just picked up the Morena Bizzarini Lamborghini for 64,499K at the auction. Don't know how much these bring but it's in the 50's condition for all body 52%, parts 53%, frame 59%, interior 57%.