How to Make a Million Bells Fast - Animal Crossing: New Horizons Guide - IGN (2024)

You can use Time Travel to make a million bells fast and you won’t have to worry about weeds or villagers leaving. Your only real consequence is sometimes having to kill a few roaches in your home.

Cheat Update:As of Update 1.2.0, the interest has dropped from 0.5% to 0.0005% with a max interest of 9,999 Bells instead of the previous 99,000. Making the cheat below irrelevant. We're leaving it on this page for historical purposes and to address this for those still looking up this cheat. For money making cheats check out our Cheats and Secrets page. And for legitimate strategies check out our Money Making Guide.

The money you deposit into your ABD Savings account will gain interest over time. Like real-life, the longer you leave that money - in the bank, untouched; and the more money you have in the bank period - the more money you will gain! Fortunately, unlike real-life, this interest rate is actually pretty good!

You can watch the video version of this guide below, or keep scrolling to read the directions.

How to Make a Million Bells Fast

Here’s how to get a million bells easily:

Use this exploit after getting access to the ABD Bank, available at the Nook Stop, and before you start trying to get more residents to your Island by building them furniture.

• Forget about paying off the loan on your house for now.
• Put all your money into the bank. It can be a lot or just a few thousand bells. (Personally, we started this process with 45,000 Bells).
• Save and exit your game by pressing the (-) symbol and closing the software.
• Change your system clock to the year 2000. Month and date doesn’t matter but we liked keeping it the same to avoid extra variables.
• Start the game so that Tom Nook thinks it’s the year 2000. Read all your mail. (You may already have a letter from the bank saying there’s interest from doing this time jump BUT interest is never deposited into your bank for going back in time so don’t celebrate yet).
• Save and exit your game by pressing the (-) symbol and closing the software.
• Change your system clock to the year 2060.
• Start the game so that Tom Nook thinks you’re in 2060. Read all your mail. Note: Sometimes you will get 2 letters, each for 99,999 bells but you’ll notice only 99,9999 bells will actually be deposited into your account.
• The max amount of interest you can earn is 99,999
• Check your bank! We recommend checking your bank account each time you do this to make sure you’re doing it correctly!
• Depending on how much money you have in the bank, it may take a while to get the max interest and a while to find the minimum amount of years you need to jump in order to get the max interest. So experiment a bit with how much you’re changing your clock because jumping ahead repeatedly is easier than jumping back, then ahead, then back ahead.
• Once we had 900,000 Bells in our savings we only had to jump 2 years ahead to get that 99,999 bells interest.
• REMEMBER you only gain interest when you’re moving forward in time.
• Repeat this time jumping process until you get 1,000,00 Bells! Go for more if you’d like.
• You can likely do this later in the game too but you’ll risk weeds growing and Residents leaving. They may not leave immediately but could start leaving suddenly once you get back into your daily routine.

If you’re interested in getting rich quick but don’t want to Time Travel, be sure to check out our Money Making Guide for tips outside of this exploit!

And you can learn more tricks like this by checking out our Cheats and Secrets page and our Money Making Guide.