TLDR: Hell's banks can be used like a 90s credit card scheme to finance everything.
If you nabbed "Afterlife" off of Good Old Games you may be wondering how to start out. It's very difficult to get out of the red before the 4 surfers of apocalypso come crashing on your door and literally destroy your paradise and/or perfect torture.
The wisdom of the internet says to only build heaven or hell (usually hell, which is actually even more wrong, I'll explain why later). This strategy only works on easy at best, the other game modes just don't have the cash to deal with the initial loss the player experiences as they're building their afterlives up. I found the solution. I will warn you though, it's a spoiler, because it's also a hilarious twist on this game's main point: mocking 90s pop culture and lifestyle.
So what is it? Well basically, the strategy is to use infinite cash to wait out the period where your afterlives are negative until you finally make them profitable. Infinite cash you say? From where? Turns out the banks in heaven and hell loan money markedly different: Heaven charges yearly interest, whereas hell DOESN'T. And if you don't pay the money off, the banks in hell nab souls from your afterlife (not sure if it's one or both heaven or hell, I'll do science and update later). BUT you can pay off the banks in hell early and prevent them from nabbing souls. You can also immediately pay off and then re-withdraw the amount you borrowed. See where I'm going here? The banks cost less to build than what they actually loan. So as long as you have enough cash to build a bank, you essentially can never go bankrupt: Just build enough banks to have enough cash to cover one loan. All you have to do is make sure you're holding enough cash for a single loan, and then cycle through all of your bank(s) in hell periodically paying off and re-withdrawing (I do like every 50 years). Why is this hilarious? The 90s were the heyday of credit card schemes. Balance transfer fees weren't really a thing then. So people would constantly cycle debt between multiple cards and sometimes even found ways to earn money in the process with various rewards. So it makes perfect sense that the creators, in an effort to mock 90s culture, would make it all but required to finance your afterlives this way. I was literally kicking myself after multiple failed attempts at a single afterlife on higher difficulties when I realized this. I could get the "just heaven or hell" strategy to work for "easy" difficulty but that was it. Given how badly you bleed cash at the beginning of this game, and how it's literally impossible to finance both afterlives simultaneously, even on the lowest difficulty, I'm 100% sure that this business model for the early game was intentional and the creators did their best to make you realize that by making you bleed so hard at the beginning of the game that you'd be desparate to look at your lending options. Like why wouldn't they want you building both? That's the point of the game. Unfortunately, I don't think the gaming community got the joke because the person who introduced me to this game told me that the game was nigh impossible. There's an advantage to building both afterlives simultaneously too: the total population of both is used to calculate the value of souls coming in. So in the long run, you're better off building both simultaneously if possible.
Profitability: As long as you can balance your vibes for heaven and hell and more souls are coming in, you will be profitable. The easiest way to control vibes is to build training centers interspersed throughout your afterlives. Be sure to turn them off often enough to be importing at least 10% of your workforce. Idle angels or demons will destroy the other afterlife. Also, in heaven, you want to mix the rewards as much as possible (group clusters that are unalike together). Hell does better with uniformity in its punishments.
Why is heaven better for the single afterlife strategy? Because souls more readily train to become angels than demons. Every time I've built both heaven and hell at the same time, heaven has broken even much faster because the number of angels that are self-trained goes up way faster than the number of self-trained demons in my hell. These "Natively" trained demons or angels are much cheaper than imported ones. There's a catch though: if you ever get idle natively trained demons or angels, they'll attack the opposing afterlife. For this reason, it's best to maintain at least a 10% imported workforce. As your afterlife becomes more populated, you can probably get away with even more imported angels/demons. That might be optimal because I don't know that the "Afterlife" arcology equivalent employs the same number of demons/angels as normal dwellings do in the end game.
EDIT: Looks like I found an outdated game FAQ dated from 1996 with this strategy explained, But it's just a detail amongst many others. I'm shocked it doesn't describe it in any sort of quick start guide :
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/pc/196555-afterlife/faqs/2026
I also figured this out, all on my own.
