Financial problems are fairly common in the low levels, though if handled early can stay completely solved for the remainder of your mob career. Whether you just don't have enough money to make the next purchase to unlock a job, can't afford to completely outfit your family, or you actually lose money every hour, here you will find general strategies to help guide you out of these problems.
One important consideration before we get into the exact details of how to roll a bankroll is whether or not you are truly completely broke. If you have no cash on hand, no money in the bank, and your income every hour is negative the good news is you can't drop below $0. There is no debt system in the game. If you go to the Properties tab in the game, you will see what you current income is, how much your current upkeep is, and the difference between the two that you make every hour. To get actual details on the upkeep, you need to go to the Inventory tab and scroll through the different lists in the Mafia store to see which items you own that are contributing upkeep costs.
Since the hitlist strategy to get your bankroll started is the most efficient, you will want to be able to keep some money aside for hospital bills so you can take a shot every 15 minutes without having to wait for your health to recover naturally. It is recommended that you sell off just enough of your high upkeep items, specifically Tommy Guns and Chain Guns, until you are at least making some money every hour again. Bank the proceeds from these sales so you don't lose the money while you experiment with rolling the bankroll up.
Workin' for a livin'
The most straight forward approach to making some money is just to do some jobs. At the low levels, specifically below level 24, you won't get as much from doing jobs as other players. Long term, passive income from properties will quickly exceed the money you can make running jobs.
As you are starting out, you will need the money from these first few jobs to be able to buy the equipment to try bigger and better jobs. This money will also provide the cash for your hospital bills. The best return from the first few jobs is "Collect on a Loan". It provides the most cash per energy from your initial choices and only requires you own a baseball bat which has no upkeep. See Doin' the Job to get further breakdowns of how much money the higher level jobs will pay as you continue to unlock them.
For making money from jobs, there are a few aspects of the current Top Mafia bonuses that should be discussed. You can assign the highest level Mogul in your family to the position of Bagman, and the higher their level, the higher percentage of bonus money you will make on the jobs. If you are someone else's Bagman (meaning you are a Mogul type yourself), there is a chance you will get the money from a job you perform doubled. Since the money you make from jobs will be quickly dwarfed by your passive income from properties if you follow the advice outlined here, these benefits will be barely noticeable.
Covetin' from your neighbor
If you don't have the money you need yourself, you can always look to make others share with you, whether or not they are willing. While your income is in the awkward stages of $250,000 an hour to $5,000,000 an hour, making money off other players will supplement your income better than any other source. Fightin' and Robbin' gets in the details of how to successfully win fights and succeed at robberies. Fights will generate money based on how much your victim has as cash on hand. Robberies generate money as a factor of the type of property your victim owns as well as the number of them he currently owns; however, you can't even attempt robberies until you are level 15 and it doesn't really become worthwhile until your victims have Office Buildings, 5-Star Hotels or Mega-Casinos.
In the level stretch before Office Buildings can be bought by you and your victims, fighting can help build your bankroll. You can get as much as $100,000 as the result of a fight. If you receive $0 from a target after fighting them, it means that all of their money is banked. You will want to go down the list of potential victims trying each one that you can beat once as usual, but any time you get at least $60,000 from your victim, you should continue to attack until they stop coughing up money. Make sure you bank your ill gotten gains as soon as you can as this behavior will most likely result in a hit being put on you. This is effectively meaningless though as long as your money is in the bank and you didn't bother going to the hospital after your rampage.
Once Office Buildings start to be available, robberies begin to provide more cash than fights. You can get from $200,000 a robbery on the low end to $855,000 on the high end from someone with 250 Mega-Casinos. Once again, you will make more money by hitting a juicy target multiple times, but this also will make it more likely that your victim will put a hit out on you. If your target does not have over 200 of the type of building you are targeting, I would recommend trying to hit a building just once or twice before choosing another target. This makes it much more likely your victim won't bother trying to get even with you.
Makin' the hit
Especially when you are first starting out, nothing comes close to performing hits for getting your initial bankroll started. As an experiment, we started up a new character and using this trick we were able to get our income up to $542,250 an hour without leveling. When you choose the Fight tab, you will see Hitlist as an option in the second row of options. The first detail you need to know is that every time you choose "Hitlist", even if you are currently on it, it refreshes the list of available hits.
When you attempt to perform a hit, it performs an attack on your victim, just like a Fight, but without the chance for a special loot drop. You still get the same money and XP. The important detail though is that you do damage to your opponent even if you lose the fight. All you need to do in order to collect the bounty is be the person who causes enough damage for your target to drop to 0 health. This means that regardless of your level, you can cash in on a hit placed on any target. Keep in mind though to be fully healed before you start, have enough stamina to try several times in a row, and have all your money in the bank so you don't lose money in failed attacks.
The highest amount a hit can be is currently $16,000,000. To get your bankroll started, keep refreshing the Hitlist tab until you find a target that has an $8,000,000 hit or larger placed on them. As soon as one comes up on the list, immediately attack them and keep clicking the Attack Again! button until you either succeed, run out of stamina, or someone else takes out your target. It can take a little patience to wait for a large enough hit to show up to be worth it, but it is worth the wait. If you don't succeed, just wait for your stamina to recover, heal up, bank your money and try again. On the flipside, since you will lose a lot and get injured frequently, it is completely worthless to do one of the $8,000 hits. Actually, the low value hits aren't worth it for anyone, but there are a lot of mediocre players out there. At the lowest levels, you will only be able to try a hit every 15 minutes, so we strongly recommend you never bother with any hit less than $8,000,000.
Balance the books
Once you get your immediate cash on hand fixed, you also need to make sure you keep your money situation solved. On the property tab you can see how much money you make an hour, how much your total expenses are an hour, and how much your cash on hand will net up each hour. It is strongly recommended no matter how badly you need an item, you don't let your expenses exceed 10% of your income. This guarantees that your properties will pay for themselves quickly enough to return most of that money to you in order to both get the items you need as well as more properties to raise your budget for expenses.
This is a good time to mention the Top Mafia bonuses to your income. It used to be you would get a 1% boost to your income for every member in your Top Mafia up to a maximum of 8%. This has changed when the Top Mafia was dropped to 6 members. Now, you get an 8% boost to your income if your Top Mafia is full with 6 members. You don't seem to get any bonus for less than that anymore. This means it should be an early priority to get at least 6 friends and at least one of each of the three character types as outlined in Getting Started.
Likewise, pay attention to your cash on hand. If you are getting beaten up frequently for your money, be sure you are banking it more regularly. Banked money can't be lost in fights, though is also can't be used for purchases. You will need to withdraw the money you need for property purchases and item purchases. If you do this while your health is less than 20, you can't be attacked for it before you make the purchase.
Finally, never heal your health unless you need to in order to leverage your stamina or you are about to do a boss fight. The lower your health, the less money you can lose to fights since other players can't attack you for money once your health drops below 20. On a similar note, when you do heal at the hospital, try to do it before you bank money. Hospital bills will pull from your bank account, but the money in your bank you paid a 10% laundering fee on, so effectively, that hospital bill is 10% more if you pay it from the bank rather than your cash on hand.
When to bank your cash flow… and when not
Next to your cash you have the option to go to the bank. To sum it up very simply, whenever you deposit money, 10% of the amount you deposit is deducted as a laundering fee. Withdrawing money has no penalties. You gain no interest on the money you have in the bank. Your money total shown in the stat bar is always just your cash on hand, so you must actually go to the bank to see how much money you have in the bank.
There used to be daily rewards, one of which was that the bank laundering fee was waived. The old way to get around laundering was to wait till these days and then deposit as much as you can. This feature has since been removed.
