Investment

Investment in Vendetta can be either illegal (using a Character's 'Business Account') or legal (using his 'Bank Account'). Illegal Investment: Many of the illegal Racket types either require investment or can earn more income from having more investment. Of those that require investment, a Character will not be able to set up such a racket unless the required amount of funds is available in his illegal 'Business Account'. Many rackets will require a certain level of funding before they can be properly set up, part of which costs will be for premises and partly cash investment in order to operate the racket efficiently & profitably. Of those rackets for which extra investment is optional, there are two forms of these. The first type of optional investment affects supply rackets, meaning those handling goods of some description such as booze or drugs. While extra investment in these doesn't directly affect profits, it does allow extra stocks to be carried. This can be beneficial should supplies be interrupted (due to rival or police activities), or to take advantage of special offers - such as a hijacker offering a truckload of good whiskey at a cheap price, if your Character has the cash immediately available with which to pay for it. The second type of optional illegal investment is restricted to those rackets where cash itself is the commodity, such as shylocking or loansharking (lending money illegally at exorbitant interest rates), and almost all the gambling rackets. For these 'cash-commodity' rackets the operating Character has to submit Orders to purposely increase the investment, unlike the supply rackets mentioned above where he will simply use any cash held in his illegal 'Business Account'. For cash-commodity rackets such as shylocking and gambling, extra funding must be specifically allocated to the racket should you wish to do so. In the case of loansharking, the operating Character would use this extra money putting more cash on the streets in loans, thereby earning more income in future. For the gambling rackets, he would store the cash on the premises where it will be available to pay any big winners. By this means would the gambling racket be able to accept larger bets and have higher stakes, and therefore make more income each week - provided the cash reserve is there with which to pay the occasional big winner at these higher stakes. In most cases there is a limit to the amount of cash any one racket can have in reserve or invested in this fashion. For instance, a back-street gambling den will never attract any really big rollers as these go to a better class of place anyway - one where there's less chance of being mugged in the alley on the way home, for instance. However, the 'investment' limit will vary greatly from racket to racket and in all cases is certainly worth investing to its maximum, over time. All such optional racket investments may also be withdrawn at a later date, if large amounts of cash are suddenly needed elsewhere. Gambling rackets usually allow instant withdrawal of any amount (the house simply reduces its maximum stakes accordingly, reducing its income also), while something like a Loansharking racket will have a limit on the amount able to be withdrawn each week as the operator needs time to collect the debts; he doesn't actually have most of the invested cash on hand. Legal Investment: The most common form of legal investment is to buy property, usually including a legitimate business of some description. More often than not this would then also be used as a 'front' for an illegal racket operating from that property, but it's also possible to buy property purely as an investment, earning legal income from rents. These would most commonly be such as whole apartment & office blocks. Property of this kind - those not being used as a 'front' for illegal rackets - is known as real estate investment. This provides the safest form of income in the game, being especially hard for rivals or ordinary police to trace to the real owner. For the tax investigator, however, it's a different story entirely. Anything larger than the smallest legitimate property & businesses should never be purchased with anything other than totally 'clean' money, from a Character's legal 'Bank Account'. Of course there is nothing to actually prevent you from using large wads of illegal cash from his illegal 'Business Account' for the purchase of property & businesses, but any such transaction is recorded and may be later uncovered as vital evidence against him in a tax evasion case. Indeed, it would be safe to say that any such investigation will almost certainly discover the transaction sooner or later, so it's really not often worth the risk. Other forms of high-level legitimate investment are reserved for high-ranking Characters at a later stage in the game.