If you want your family to live in an expensive house right from the start, first movie them into a really cheap house they can afford with their starting §20000, and then use the motherlode cheat a few times. Move them back into the family bin, and they will be able to buy any house they want.

Warning: This cheat may sound a little cruel, so don't do it if you don't like killing your Sims on purpose.
Have a Sim start painting on an easel at home, preferably with full creativity skill. Have them make lots of paintings. Make sure this isn't your only Sim, and not your favorite either. Once a bunch of paintings are complete, if the painter had max creativity skill, they could be worth §300-§600. Then kill the Sim that made them. The value will usually at least double, and you can sell them for that amount.

If you're all about the money and/or don't care what your house looks like, here's a way to be efficient, money saving, and need very minimal space. You really only need a two room house, one big, one very small. The small one can be a bathroom, and the other one can have a kitchen with low end counters/fridge. How expensive these things are won't affect your use of them. Then buy the best and most expensive recliner. Your Sim will eat in the recliner, (you won't need a kitchen table), raise a lot of comfort in the recliner, and sleep in the recliner (you won't need a bed). Your Sim can juggle bottles from the fridge (which is free) for entertainment. Now you're living smartly!

Here's how to get pizza completely free. When you order it and the delivery guy comes, just wait around and do not accept the delivery, then eventually the delivery guy will just leave the pizza on your front yard and you will not have to pay. Then just pick up the pizza and dig in! You will not have to pay or anything! I know, seems like a bit of an obvious cheat, but if it's there, it's definitely worth it.

If your Sim needs to study for work to get a promotion or just wants to get the benefits of a book for free, all you have to do is buy a bookcase, take a book out, put the book on the floor, and then sell your bookcase. That way, you get to keep the book and all its regular benefits, and get your money back for the bookcase.

First make a foundation of any size. Then remove the center of the foundation, leaving a one tile width border. Then choose an outside wall covering with a skirting or marked base. Go into the big empty space in the middle of the foundation, and apply the wall covering to the interior walls. Then lower the terrain in the middle all the way until it becomes level with the skirting at the bottom. You should then level the terrain in the basement to the point level with the wall base, and there should be a big empty hole in the ground with a flat bottom, surrounding by a border of foundation, and with walls made from the foundation. Then place stairs somewhere on the low ground. You can then add flooring for the first level, and then walls, etc., and then another level if you wish, and your Sims will be able to go in and out of their basement! You are now finished making a basement, in which you can built and place just like any other floor. The outside walls will always be that of the foundation.

You won't need your stove or your counters anymore to keep yourself alive. All you need to do is get Jello from your refrigerator. It stays fresh for a very long tim, fulfills hunger, and doesn't need any prepping. It also takes a very minimal amount of food from your fridge.

One way to save money is to just buy the kid muffin-making stove and have them cook and make muffins. The stove is cheaper than a real stove and the muffins are free and don't require any food. Have all your Sims live on these muffins. It will be a lot cheaper than having them actually cook.

All you have to do is go onto your documents file, and go on to EA games, then the Sims 2, then music, then choose where you want your music to go (pop, rock, classical, etc.) If you have music on your computer (I suggest iTunes) then you drag the music into whatever particular music folder you want it in.. When you go on the Sims 2 next, buy them a radio, then tell them to switch it to whatever folder you dragged it into (pop, rock, classical, etc.).

Note by ballju: If you want it to only play your music go into options > music options and select only your music to be played.

If you are on a mac and want to make wants or fears come true, go to a community lot, open up the cheat window (Option-Control-Shift C), and type in "boolProp Testingcheatsenabled true". Save and exit to the neighborhood. Open up a house with any number of sims in it. View your wants/fears panel, and Control-click. That want should come true, and if it was a power want, others may change as well. If you make a want for a sim's relationship status become a friend (if you want to have a friend relationship with someone) come true, it may display a want for achieving a best friend relationship. ***This does add points to your sim's aspiration point count!!!

If you have the "moveObjects on" cheat in use currently, go to Grab Mode, pick up the mailbox, and delete it. You will never have to pay bills again. However, you will not be able to get it back for that lot ever again, so be careful.

It may be a little weird, but Sims can get pregnant and earn money from it. Just get a Sim with a job pregnant so you know the pregnancy will fall mostly on the whatever days off the Sim regularly has. The Sim will be placed on Maternity Leave, and will get paid for every day she misses, even the days she would normally be off and not get paid for. If you don't mind lots of children and spending some time on this cheat, it's certainly one way of making money.

You would think that all items would deteriorate value and would eventually lose you money if you sold them. But art is different. A lot of the very expensive sculptures and paintings actually increase in value. So get yourself a job or any way of earning money for a little bit until you have enough for a nice good amount of expensive sculptures, and wait a long while. Leave them there a couple days, and you could get anywhere from §10-§200!
Warning: Some may also depreciate randomly, but will usually gain back value after a short amount of time.

Is your Sim happy enough with lots of Aspiration points but very little money? This is a way to make money, if very slowly. Smart milk is one of the cheapest Aspiration Rewards. Get it and you'll get five or six bottles in it. You can sell each bottle for §4. Keep doing this and eventually you'll get a substantial amount.

Once you have gotten to the highest level in a job, switch to another job and start getting promotions again. The bonuses from getting promoted will always be higher than just staying at the top level in any job.

Both teens and elders can have jobs, but they don't make much. They would make more simply painting, so have them paint with full skills and they'll earn more for the family.

If you want to live your life as an artist and not actually get a job so you can work on your own time and actually get fun from it, you can start your career when you're an adult with your own place with max skills and get the big bucks right from the start if you make the Sim drink Smart milk when they're a toddler and use the little xylophone toy. They will earn creativity points doing this faster than a teen would actually painting. Also, children can earn money from concerts with a high creativity score, so it's useful in many ways.

Here's a tip: When you adopt a child, and the social worker comes by to bring the child, DO NOT greet her before she enters the house and gives you the child, as if you do this she will never leave, and you will be unable to use Build/Buy mode. You could also use this to kill her, but her car will remain.

This may sound a little cruel, but getting NPC's to move in with you will usually get you at least §1,000, and then you can make them move out again and still keep that amount of money. It's kind of evil, but if you're that desperate and not worried about messing up the storyline with the pre made NPC's, it's worth it.

Sort of like the bookcase trick, all you do is buy any item you want but that you only need for its uses/benefits, use it for a day (most items' value decreases after a day) and then sell it before the day is over.

Go into CAS and go to the face morphing area where you can adjust the sliders to set facial features. There is a glitch here where you can max all of the sliders so they have extreme features, then set the face to one of the preset models, and then go back to the sliders, and the sliders will have reset themselves, but the features will remain the same. Keep on doing this and you can set the sliders to make any features as big as plates! You can make really deformed-looking Sims with this weird in-game glitch.