Question for others who play with aging off

I always play with aging off. I age up the toddlers after about 4-6 days.
After their parents teach them to walk and talk.
Then with the children I usually play it by ear, aging them up after they've been a child about 10 days.

I play with aging off because I write stories on the Sims, and everyone would age too fast for me to get the screen shots I wanted.
When I need to age them up, I use the Trigger Age Transition cheat.
For my current story, which is covering a few years but taking ages to play, I make a note of when the children were born and age babies up a year in story time later, age toddlers up when they would be 4 (that's when they start school in the UK) and children to teens in the autumn they're 11, because that's when our secondary school starts.

If I'm playing in a world with no school (depends on the story I'm writing) then I also use a cheat code to edit their personality after they age up, because of course they haven't got any grade at all from their schooling.
Another alternative is to put a school in for a day, so that they've got some homework in their backpack, take the school out again and if there's an adult around with a high enough logic skill, they can tutor them and get their grades up.

Happy Simming!

My general rule is to age a sim whenever I feel it is time to move on, when there are no more new intersting stuff for him to go through in current age phase.

In my shorter saves, when I want my game to progress quickly, I can age a child once he completed the "get on the honor roll" wish (they usually get this and it means they got an A in school for 3 days in a staright), and I think it usually gives them 1000 points. If I feel that a specific sim is struggling, I can decide to do this easier and age a sim after only one A in school...

In my longer saves, which usually played rotationally, I prefer to age the whole age group at once, or at least in a short time (and so I'll age all teens together, then all children, then all toddlers...). I like to keep their experiences in life with the same friends they grew up with during life (it is weird to me that two kids are friends and suddenly one of them is teen and looks totally different). So I do the aging kind of in parallel / day after day/ sometimes I'll even move them to the same household to celebrate them all in once. Also, it should be noted that not only I like to age all sims from the same age group at the same time, but also I do the different age groups one after another (before continuing on with my regular story) because I want to keep the town's population balanced.

The only residents in my town are households that used to be my main ones. My game's aging feature is turned off because I want to get the most out of every identity. If I grow tired of my sims, I just jump ship to another household.

This is one of the reasons I enjoy using NRAAS Tagger so much. Tagger allows me once set properly to mouse over the sim and find out quickly how many “days” he has before age-up. And then I age the sims via clicking on them and doing an “Age Transition”.

I wish there was a way of noting which teens age up when with various lifespans within the given EA lifespan sliders. But those are all thrown out the window when you start adjusting the lifespans manually in the .ini file. ?

Gets kinda complicated when you want to keep the whole town at an accurate age-up schedule, figuring out who to age up. I think when I start a game, if I want to keep accurate tabs of everyone in the town, I’d have to put everyone in the town into an Excel spreadsheet gauging when their birthdays are and when they age-transition so that I can manually age transition them when appropriate.

Speaking of aging, is there a way to adjust the aging bar the same way you can adjust needs? I swear I saw someone do it, like, 8 years ago and I have not heard anything about it being a possibility since.

…other than manually adjusting the .ini file before starting the game, I don’t think so.