I just happened to find a Speech trainer at the Bard college and although the box says it cost 1000, "4000 gold deducted" flashed up on my screen.

For ONE lesson. What's up with this??

Hmm, I've never heard of this. I know you can pickpocket your gold back from trainers. Extremely helpful for raising skills at no cost. At least check him and see how much gold he has now. Depeneding on how much gold you take and how high your pickpocket level is dictates the percentage of chance to steal the gold back. I have a high pickpocket level so it's ususally easy to get gold back from trainers. You can speak to a trainer in pickpocket to raise your skill then steal your gold back. Everytime you steal your gold back it usually raises your skillanother level. If the trainer didn't want that to happen she shouldn't have been training to pickpocket then, lol. The trainer I went to was a woman begger in Windhelm.

What's your level in speech at the moment?

I took one lesson to raise it to 75, and now that I am able to sell anything to anybody (perk) and invest in their business (different perk) I am not worried about stealing my money back: my loot lockers are finally nearing empty.

Well I haven't raised any of my levels that high yet so maybe it actually does cost 4000 gold to train with someone. I know the price raises depending on your current level in that particular skill but I'm not sure how much it raises. My level is somewhere near 45 and it cost me just over 1000 gold.

That sounds right, I just dinged 42 with that speech lesson.