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Thank you for digging into this and for the theory, which is exactly the kind of thing worth writing down.

I went and checked the loan code specifically because of your comment, and loans do get added to the principal correctly; nothing gets wiped or forgotten when you pay back down. So that part I can rule out.

What I think you were seeing is the refinancing. Your log shows you signed the 3% tier, straight down from the starting 10% you skipped the 6% one entirely. That cuts the minimum payment to roughly a third of what it was, instantly, on whatever the debt happens to be at that moment. On a debt of a few million that is very easily "several hundred thousand" lower than the number you had in your head, and it happens the moment you click the button rather than gradually. The game tells you the new rate but does a poor job of connecting it to the payment you're about to see, which is on me.

If that doesn't match what you remember particularly if the payment looked wrong before you refinanced I'd really like to know, because then it is something else and I'd want to find it.

It was a mistake, my first language is Spanish and I used ChatGPT for the translation, my mind completely overlooked that part of the text because it wasn't in the original text I told ChatGPT to translate, sorry

Thanks for sticking with it through the loading trouble sorry about that. Right now the page shows nothing at all while it loads, so a slow or interrupted load looks identical to a broken game, which is my fault. I'm adding a proper loading state and a retry.

If you have a second: which browser were you on, and was it a blank page or an error message? That'd help me narrow it down.

And you're right about the difficulty. Two other logs say the same thing the debt sits still for 30 minutes and then falls over all at once, which reads as "long" rather than "hard". That's getting reworked.

This is exactly what I was hoping someone would send thank you. The AFK doesn't skew it much, and honestly the log tells me things I couldn't have guessed: you missed 10 of 11 payments, and the debt didn't start going down until minute 35. That's not what the game is supposed to do. It's supposed to start bending around minute 20, gradually, not sit still for half an hour and then collapse at the end.

The other thing your log shows is that you stopped clicking around minute 12 and the game kept going which is the right shape. Compare that to what happens in your second run below and it's pretty revealing.

Genuinely, thank you for taking the time. This is the kind of thing that actually changes the design.

This is a great report and you found something real thank you for going to the trouble of editing it with your theory afterwards.

Your instinct was close. What's actually happening is that four things land in the same instant at month end: wages come in, cost of living goes out, and then the payment is taken. So the cash number never moves by the amount shown next to "Minimum payment" it moves by the net of all three. And when you can't cover the payment, the game doesn't take anything at all: the interest gets added to the principal instead, and you keep the wages. That's the "free money" you saw. It's doing what it was designed to do, but there's no receipt anywhere showing you that, so it just looks broken. That's a fair thing to call a bug.

It also has a nastier side you spotted without naming it: missing a payment pays you, which is a perverse incentive I need to fix.

On the credit rating you're right, and that's the bigger problem. It's meant to be the spine of the whole act (drop your rate from 10% to 1.5% and that's how the debt becomes payable), but the way it's currently balanced you finish before it ever becomes relevant. Same with the schemes: "Sell the car" and the rest are a permanent global multiplier on everything you earn, but all four of them unlock in the last 3 minutes of a 35-minute game, so they fly past in a blur. No wonder they felt like they did nothing.

Everything you listed is going on the fix list. Thanks for playing it properly and writing.