Guide

How to play Quidsmith

Quidsmith Guides · Updated 2026-07-03 · 10 min read

Quidsmith is a UK personal-finance life simulation. You steer one person from age 25 to 100, making the money decisions a lifetime throws at you. This is the full guide to how it works.

The goal

Survive from age 25 to age 100 without your current account ever reaching £0. Reach 100 and your final net worth sets your ending tier. Along the way a second axis, wellbeing, shapes your health and your final Life Score.

Each year

1. Review your snapshot: income, expenses and economy conditions.
2. Allocate money across investment products using the tabs.
3. Click Advance Year to simulate.
4. Review the Annual Statement: what happened and how your net worth changed.
5. Occasionally an unexpected event fires, a cost taken straight from your current account.

The products at a glance

Two workhorses do most of the heavy lifting: a Global ETF for growth and gilts for ballast. The case for holding them together is in why a gilt and Global ETF mix works so well.

Available balance

The header shows Available: your current account minus all planned deposits, plus planned withdrawals. If it goes red you have over-allocated. You can still advance, but your account may go negative.

Your home and mortgages

You start out renting. When you can afford the deposit you can buy a home, a flat, a house or a detached home, paying cash or taking a mortgage (fixed, tracker, SVR or offset). A mortgage spreads the cost but adds interest; you can make overpayments to clear it faster, watching for any early-repayment charge. Owning removes rent from your living costs, and the property tracks house prices each year, but it now carries an annual maintenance cost too. You can move later, upsizing or downsizing between tiers and rolling your equity in, paying stamp duty and moving costs on the way. See rent vs buy, when to move home and should you overpay your mortgage.

Your car

A car is an unavoidable cost. You can lease it for one steady monthly payment with no upkeep, or buy a budget, mid-range or premium car. An owned car has a running cost, loses value over time, and can break down for a repair bill or, occasionally, be written off. Cheaper cars break down more, so the sticker price is only half the story: see choosing a car.

Shaping your income

Your salary is not fixed. You can pay for education to lift it permanently (worth most early, when it has decades to compound), or start a side hustle for a variable second income that costs money to run and can fold or take off. Both are optional trade-offs against simply investing the money: see boosting your income.

Buy-to-let

From the property flow you can buy a rental property: a one-bed flat, a terraced house, or a higher-yield HMO. Buy with cash or a buy-to-let mortgage (interest-only by default, minimum 50% deposit). Rent is taxed as income with a basic-rate Section 24 credit, purchases carry an SDLT surcharge, and a sale is liable to CGT. Watch for voids and maintenance, which eat into yield. Full detail in is leveraged property worth it.

Tax on your pay

Your salary pays income tax on the frozen UK bands (20% above the £12,570 personal allowance, 40% from £50,270, 45% from £125,140) and National Insurance at 8% between £12,570 and £50,270 and 2% above. Thresholds stay frozen while pay rises, so over the decades more of your income drifts into the higher bands. In The Forge you can also play under the rules of Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland, and start with a student loan, repaid at 9% of pay above your plan's threshold and written off after its term.

Children and Ironmum

Ironmum, in the Story Mode list, is Standard with a family: children at 32, 34 and 36, each with 39 weeks of maternity leave (26 at full pay, then Statutory Maternity Pay), full-time nursery and half of the family's costs. In The Forge you can plan any family: up to ten children, twins and triplets, adoption, your share of the costs, childcare, leave and how you go back to work.

Raising a child costs about £9,300 a year before rent and childcare (from the Child Poverty Action Group's Cost of a Child), and nursery prices follow the 2026 Childcare Survey, after the free hours working families get. Once children start school, working parents pay for after-school and holiday clubs until 11 (Coram's 2026 Holiday Childcare Survey). Child Benefit, the High Income Child Benefit Charge and Tax-Free Childcare are included, so an income just over £60,000 or £100,000 can cost more than you might expect. Means-tested benefits such as Universal Credit are not modelled, so lower earners and single parents would usually get more help in real life than the game shows.

Time with children also shapes your pay. A year with leave earns only part of that year's pay rise, a part-time year half of it, and a career break none, while pay drifts down a little, as research on the parenthood pay gap finds. You can pay into a Junior ISA for each child under 18 (up to £9,000 a year each) from the ISA tab. It is the child's money, so it leaves your net worth, and at 18 it is theirs. If you plan university support in The Forge, their Junior ISA pays towards it first.

Pensions and retirement

Your salary stops at age 60. While working, auto-enrolment puts 5% of gross into your workplace pension and your employer adds 3% free; you can top up via a SIPP (combined £60,000/yr allowance, tax relief at your marginal rate). Pensions grow tax-free but are locked until 57. From 57 you draw down: 25% tax-free, the rest taxed as income. The State Pension (£241.30 a week, about £12,550 a year, inflation-linked) starts at 68. See pensions explained and making your money last from 60 to 100.

FIRE Mode

FIRE Mode, on the main menu, asks one question: how early can you stop working? It starts like Standard, but there is no fixed retirement age. From 30 a Retire now button on the Overview ends your salary for good, and a FIRE panel tracks your FI number (25 times your yearly spending, the 4% rule), your progress towards it, your Coast FI number and the years your pension stays locked. Once retired, whatever your pensions do not cover is sold automatically from cash, then your GIA, then your ISA. Retire too early and the money runs out before 100. The FIRE board ranks the earliest retirement that lasted, with Life Score breaking a tie. Your State Pension now depends on your National Insurance record: 35 qualifying years for the full amount, at least 10 for any, so retiring young costs you some of it. See retiring early.

Annuities

From age 50 you can spend a lump sum on an annuity: a guaranteed income for the rest of your life. The rate is set from your wellbeing and predicted inflation, so lower wellbeing buys a better rate. It is a one-off purchase and sits outside your net worth.

Wellbeing and Life Score

Three standing habits, diet, exercise and community, are funded as a cost-neutral carve-out of your living costs, so spending on them is a choice about where the same money goes. Their lifelong average feeds a subtle health effect and your final Life Score, which blends wealth against par with wellbeing as a geometric mean. Money alone does not max it out.

Life-event choices

Now and then a choice card appears: backing a startup for equity, lending to family, a career move, and the like. These are separate from unexpected events, and many have deferred payoffs that only resolve years later, for better or worse.

Unexpected events

Every 2 to 5 years a random expense fires. Each kind of event has its own realistic price, from a few hundred pounds for a vet visit to tens of thousands for subsidence or a redundancy, and every price rises with inflation. If your current account cannot cover it, a liquidation screen appears where you sell investments to cover the shortfall. Time-locked savings accessed early forfeit their interest and carry a 2% penalty; pensions are inaccessible before 57. This is why an emergency fund matters.

Exotics: gold and crypto

Gold is a crisis hedge: low long-run return, but it tends to rise when the market crashes and when inflation is high. Crypto is the high-stakes corner: wildly volatile, GIA only, with a small annual chance of a ~90% collapse. Keep both small. See the exotics, reviewed.

Gambling: lottery and casino

Quids Millions costs £2.50 a line and pays thirteen tax-free prize tiers. A casino offers a slot machine (~94.9% return) and European roulette (2.70% house edge). Both are a long-run drain by design, explained in the house always wins.

Late-life care

From age 80 an unavoidable care cost (£12,000/yr in today's money) is added on top of living expenses, rising at roughly CPI + 2%. From 85 there is a growing yearly chance of needing residential care (£35,000+/yr). You can plan ahead with a care-cover policy bought between 50 and 75. See planning for late-life care.

Winning

Reach age 100 to win. Your final net worth determines your tier:

• Survived: net worth above £0 but under £100k
• Comfortable: £100k to £999k
• Wealthy: £1m to £4.99m
• Legacy: £5m and above

Jargon buster

The terms used above, in plain English. The same definitions pop up in the game when you tap an underlined word.

Cash ISA

An ISA holding cash savings. The interest is tax-free, but it tends to trail inflation.

ISA (Individual Savings Account)

A wrapper that shelters savings or investments from UK tax. You can pay in up to £20,000 a year across all your ISAs combined.

Premium Bonds

Government-backed savings that pay no interest. Instead each £1 enters a monthly prize draw, and prizes are tax-free.

GIA (General Investment Account)

A plain, taxable investment account with no deposit limit. Where you invest once the ISA allowance is used up.

CGT (Capital Gains Tax)

Tax on the profit when you sell an investment or a second property held outside an ISA. A tax-free allowance applies first, then 18% or 24%.

dividend

A share of company profits paid out to shareholders. Tax-free in an ISA; taxed above a small allowance in a GIA.

gilt

A bond issued by the UK government. It pays a fixed yearly coupon and hands your money back at maturity. Steadier than shares, and the ballast in a portfolio.

ETF (Exchange-Traded Fund)

A single fund that spreads your money across hundreds of companies at once, so no one firm can sink you. The game's Global ETF is its main growth engine.

SDLT (Stamp Duty Land Tax)

A tax paid when you buy property. Second homes and buy-to-lets carry an extra surcharge on top.

Child Benefit

A weekly payment for each child under 16, or 20 in education: £27.05 for the eldest and £17.90 for each other child in 2026/27.

Tax-Free Childcare

The government adds 20p for every 80p you pay a registered childcare provider, up to £2,000 a child a year, while each parent earns under £100,000.

Junior ISA

A tax-free savings account a parent opens for a child, up to £9,000 a year. The money is the child's and they take control of it at 18.

auto-enrolment

The rule that puts employees into a workplace pension automatically: you pay at least 5% of qualifying pay and your employer adds at least 3%.

SIPP (Self-Invested Personal Pension)

A private pension you control and choose the investments for. Contributions get tax relief; the pot is locked until 57.

State Pension

A weekly payment from the government once you reach State Pension age. In the game it starts at 68.

inflation

How fast prices rise each year. Money that grows slower than inflation buys less over time.

FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early)

Saving and investing hard enough to stop working long before State Pension age, then living off your investments.

FI number

The pot that could pay your yearly spending for good: spending divided by your withdrawal rate, so 25 times at 4%.

today's money

An amount adjusted for inflation back to the prices you started with, so figures decades apart can be compared fairly.

CPI (Consumer Prices Index)

The standard measure of inflation, how fast prices rise. It erodes the real value of any cash you hold.