Ahoy mateys!! This is my third play through. Im rich with more money than sense. I have all the houses I could ever want so what now? what would you guys do with all that gold? would you spend 3 hours giving it away to a beggar or just buy all the in game crap back that you sold to get the money?

Do you not agree maybe the developers should add something original/novel into the game that would only be obtainable with a huge amount of money?

I am on ps3 so I don't have access to wonderful mods or anything.

Hiring trainers is a great gold sink and I think it works from an RP perspective, as in order to learn to improve a skill, it makes sense that hiring a master trainer would be costly.

At least every couple of skill levels, I try to pay a trainer. Also, I tend to collect some jewelry and dragonbones without hauling it around to merchants to sell. As a result, even without any economy mods, I'm usually broke, and I've only managed to save up enough to buy a house during one playthrough.

This is where Im going wrong! I totally forgot about the trainers. Ive always been playing the game without ever using them.
I used them more in Oblivion years ago especially the master trainer in the imperial city that owns the clothes show. Boy that was tough getting 100% mercantile.

Yeah, use trainers, they will sort your problem out very quickly. I usually have the opposite problem and have to chop wood to get some extra cash every now and then.

Buy some Boats and Hoes

-Dance party on the Kataria-

How the hell do people have this problem?

When I play on console, unless I power-level Smithing and Enchanting (is that the only way that people get rich???), I can only afford one house and it usually takes the entire game to completely furnish it. AND it's the cheapest house in the game.

I have to cheat on the PC version. If I don't "player.additem f 50000" I can't seem to afford anything.

I'm not sure what you mean by "power-level," if you're talking about grinding out stuff nonstop to get a skill up I don't think that's necessary. I usually get Smithing to 100 by level 35 or so (at least) just by making and improving my own gear and using up all the raw materials I haul back from my adventures, not to mention the stuff I often have to buy from vendors so they will have enough gold to purchase everything I need to sell. Within another 10 levels or so - especially if I keep taking perks for higher level materials and finding higher level loot - I will often end up with items so valuable that I have to hit up several different vendors just to sell everything I've got. At some point I will end up with stuff so pricey that I have to sell it at a loss if I don't take the Speech perks that give vendors more gold to spend.

Alchemy is also very profitable even if all you do is pick up the ingredients you can get for free all over the place. Eat one of everything you find or do some experimenting at the alchemy table and eventually you'll have the recipes for some very expensive potions without having to stand there and grind out levels.

Depends on your character archetype (and even then it only matters so much) but generally speaking, trainers and houses are the only real gold sinks. I rarely use the former myself, as I find using them 'levels up' my skills faster than I prefer, not to mention my characters generally end up in the 40s range when I'm "done". As you pointed out, once you have all the houses it does become a question of "Now what?". I'm hoping for some gold sinks in future DLC that requires investment over time, as opposed to a one off investment (buy house, buy upgrade et al).

Between my thorough looting and the fact I always take the barter-related Speech perks, even the trainers couldn't siphon off enough money so I always ended up with insane amounts of cash and nothing to spend it on. I fixed that by quintupling the cost to train as well as greatly increasing the number of times allowed per level, with the end result that I dump well over 700K into the training fees for one skill by the time it reaches 100.

Unfortunately that's not a viable solution for some folks, either because they cannot use mods or because they don't like 'buying' skills, so it would definitely help them out if Bethesda added a massive money sink of some kind.