Buy the shop outright or take the mortgage?

What winning actually requires

Probably Stolen has one win condition: buy the building. On Normal the property is valued at 12,000 credits, and the price stays flat until day 50 before climbing daily. Every other system — reputation, crime file, Aug policy — exists to keep you alive long enough to reach that number.

The flat window is the most important structure in the game. It means the first fifty days have a fixed target, which is why early compounding matters more than early optimisation. A shop that clears 200 credits a day for forty days is closer than a shop that clears 400 for ten and then loses a week to an inspection.

It also means the late game is a different game. Once the price starts climbing daily, waiting costs money at an accelerating rate, and the decision stops being “can I afford the buyout” and becomes “can I afford to keep waiting”.

The mortgage branch

The Loan Shark offers a mortgage: a down payment now, weekly payments after, and the deed at the end. It converts a single large number into a schedule, which is exactly what a shop with steady traffic needs and exactly what a shop with unstable traffic should avoid.

The arithmetic, using community figures for the Normal preset and our own multiplication: the mortgage totals 13,160 credits against 12,000 outright. A mortgage is never cheaper — it is a fee for time, and the only question is whether the time is worth 1,160 credits to you. If the weekly payment plus rent is still covered by a normal week, the mortgage buys you the flat-price window and is usually the safer path. If it is not covered, you have converted a target into a second rent, and the failure state is now two ways to lose.

Run the check in the same currency the game uses: one normal week’s takings. If the mortgage payment is less than a quarter of that, it is comfortable. If it is more than a third, one bad inspection ends the plan.

When to buy outright

Buy outright when you can pay the full price and still cover the next two rent days. That second condition is the one players skip. The buyout ends the rent, but it does not end the costs that arrive between the purchase and the next payday, and a shop with zero cash and a fully owned building can still be closed by a confiscation.

Outright buying is also the correct choice when your margin is thin and stable. If you are running a legal, low-margin line — water, food, household goods — the mortgage fee is a meaningful percentage of your weekly profit, and the schedule adds risk you do not need. Save longer, pay once.

If the price has already started climbing, the calculation flips: every day of waiting adds cost, and the mortgage’s fixed down payment may be cheaper than the climb. This is the one situation where paying a fee for time is clearly correct.

What both paths require

Both paths require the same three things: rent paid on time every Sunday, a crime file that stays under the arrest threshold, and a customer queue that still contains people with money. The buyout is not a separate strategy; it is what happens if those three hold for long enough.

That is why the endings page matters more than the buyout page. Most runs do not fail at the purchase; they fail at the crime file, at a faction line, or at a Sunday that arrived with no cash. The purchase is the last decision, not the hard one.