SimCity can be a tough game if you're not that great at managing the budget, which is why I usually don't bother worrying about it.

First, spend all your money. Make sure you spend it on stuff like roads and police/fire departments, stuff that will want tax money to keep operating. Then, wait until the end of the year.

Then, just wait until the year ends and the budgeting screen comes up.

Start holding down the L button (and don't let it go until I tell you), and hit 'Go With Figures'

Then, go back into your Budget screen and raise all of the Funding Levels to 100%, which will result in negative Current Funds.

Then hit 'Go With Figures' again. Close all of your menus, and then release the L button.

The result?

$999,999 in the city's treasury. With that kind of cash you can do pretty much anything you want any time you want.

Go nuts.

If you're playing SimCity and throw down some residential zones, you might notice that they start out by putting up these little single-family dwellings

You can demolish them individually, which seems kind of pointless, really. But then you can put something in the hole, like a Police station.

Then you demolish the whole residential zone. The zone goes away, and so does the part of the building that was overlapping it.

It still protects the city as well as the whole building did, and you can put stuff in the extra space, like parks, to increase the value of the land. And with a little planning...

That block in the middle is a Fire station. It only takes up one block, but still protects as well as it would if it were full size.