Everyone always talks about how rich they are and how money is not a problem in this game. But I don't get it. I have less than 1000 gold on my mage level 35 and I struggle to buy spells. So I'm just asking, how do people get money so easy?

Just go into a cave/dungeon, clean out all the valuables. I did the same, and I'm overflowing with money.

Alchemy

Blue flowers and butterflies

Nuff said

Exploring because I don't fast travel and looting everything (stuff worth taking) I find from my explorations.

By playing the game

Seriously, dungeons usually contain thousands of coins worth of loot as they are a lot larger than Oblivion. In addition completing quests sometimes gives rather generous coin rewards.

1. Loot and sell anything that's more than 100 Septims in value
2. Make potions
3. Pick up bandit weapons, enchant them, then sell them
4. Never purchase your primary items (no matter how tempting it is to do), but find them
5. Roleplay your boss and never give out money to anyone (and now I know why mine doesn't!)

Crafting -- never pay for gear, except to gain key enchant effects (resist magic, absorb health/magicka/stamina), craft iron daggers and enchant with petty and lesser soul gems, typically using absorb enchant (not hard to find, and sells for a decent price). Craft dwarven bows and improve them, then enchant them. Easy to find plenty of smeltable dwemer scrap. For pity's sake, never buy ingots except for steel (corundum ore is relatively scarce, and the ore costs the same as the steel ingot it is used to create).
Certain potions sell for LOT more than restore pots. Invisibility, skill boosts, health/stam/magicka boosts, regeneration pots, etc. As Master Cat rather crypticly notes, Blue Mountain Flower + Blue Butterfly Wing makes a +Enchant pot, can use to make better enchants, or simply sell.

1. Enter a dungeon with a follower (packmule). Kill things and pick everything up. When, between the two of you, you've maxed the weight limit, go town and sell everything.
2. Return to dungeon, kill things and pick stuff up.
3. ????
4. Profit.

My level 35 has 140,000 gold. I don't even pick stuff up anymore. But, I'm anol about getting enough money for things, so it's a hard habit to break lol.

Good luck.

PS: After the game starts you end up in Riverwood. Then I got a quest to tell the Jarl about the dragon attack in Helgen. I went to there with over 6000 gold. Did a few quests and purchased the house in Whiterun (sp??). BTW, there's lot of stuff to pick up in the dungeon that takes you from Helgen to the outside and freedom. And if you don't have a follower and max the weight limit, start dropping cheaper stuff and keep more expensive items.

Also, I think if you take smithing, you can make jewelry and sell that.

How can people NOT get insanely rich in this game? Seriously? What the hell are you doing?

Sell highvalued weapons, armor, jewelry, gems, potions and scrolls I find in my travels.

one word: alchemy

A little Potion I call "Money in tha bizank" because of how much it sells for.

It's a mix of Mora Topinella (Scattered everywhere, usually on dead trees, it's the 'hard to find' ingredient), Dragon's Tounge (Found in the hotsprings area) and Fly Amantia (various caves and dungeons). I have almost zero in the way of speech skill or related perks, and they usually sell for 250 each.

Also, weapons with 'turn undead' enchantments sell like hotcakes. Guess those companions aren't so tough when it comes to keeping their cool around the undead.

well, from what I have seen, people are using exploits not patched yet to make alot of money. either the book cheat, the mannequin exploit, or whatever else you can find on youtube.

I saw a guy who stated "he does not cheat" but in his video on youtube, he clearly has about 28 million gold. the game has been out what? a month maybe?

I can believe maybe a million gold but 28 million? nope, not buying it...

Keep a value-to-weight ratio in mind. If your current level is low, then a 10:1 ratio or so is fine. As you go up levels the ratio increases.

I made loads just from looting and selling everything I killed/came across (no stealing). Excess potions are sold too, plus I don't really buy any gear from merchants, preferring to either craft or find what I need on my travels. I'm at level 33 and I think I have between 30-40k.

I loot everything and hoard, yet I still managed to net myself almost 10k in around 2 hours. If I sold everything I've got, I could buy most of the houses

You should do the thieves guild quests if you haven't done so alredy. You get Fences to sell to in every Main Cities by the end of the quest line with 4000 available septims. If you also manage to find all of the unusal gems for Vex and then recover the crown of beneziah you get a perk that enables you to find more gems in container loots. If you don't have lots of carrying capacity, just picking up these gems & selling them to the fences should be more than enough to make you rich in a hurry. Combined that with an Imperial character with traits to find additional gold in loots I've managed to save 1.1 million septims in my 174 hour plathrough so far and found over 2 million septims, which means I've almost spent a million septims in the playthrough. I'm not sure where I've spent it all.

But what's the point? I collect loot - my house in Riften has a carpet of silver swords. My bedroom in Whiterun doesn't have any floor not covered by gems and trinkets. Collect your loot. Make sure you have enough money to get by (I keep around 10k) and stash the rest. Money can't buy a carpet of diamonds!

I had earlier this evening cleared out a dwemer ruin. There was enough dwemer scrap metal to melt into almost 100 ingots (!) which I then used to make weapons and armor. Upgraded them with the remaining ingots then sold the lot.

1. Dont buy anything at all. No armor, no weapons, no soul-gems etc. The only thing you should buy once in awhile is a few health potions and thats it.

2. Loot evey item that you ever find in a cave/dungeon. Get as much as possible and only leave the less valuabe items behind.

3. Dont pay for a house. You wont need it now as you sell eveything you find when exploring. If you need to store some items, then leave it behind of a merchant/smith's house.

my mages are also always broke, because buying all this spells is expensive.

my warrior has too much money. i would say money is only a problem to mages, because they need a lot more.

warriors need almost no money. i just craft my own gear and lvled my enchanting only by using stuff i found. i could only spend money on buying more houses nowadays(mid 40s).

I'm hopin Beth will let me buy a Stronghold in the next expansion, and maybe work my way up to Jarl. I could certanily afford to run a city & pay for guards.

Simply enchant everything you can before selling it. This finally gives you something to do with ALL of those useless lil' stones too. There is a method that takes some time but will net you butt-loads of gold. However, this will also level you up fairly quickly too, so be cautious not to exceed the level you want to be.

First and foremost, enchant anything and everything you can prior to selling. If that alone doesn't net you enough you can make iron daggers, then enchant them, then sell them. I did that on my second character. This works fine but I leveled faster than I wanted too. So, my third character I only enchanted the items that I found prior to selling them.

I only buy empty soul gems; although that's on my thief character. Pick up all that you can carry based on weight to value ratio. I particular like all the daggers. 10g each. Enchant with a petty gem and Absorb Health enchant makes value of >500g. Sells for 200-300 on average.

I've bought three houses, bought all the upgrades and still have 50k gold now at level 36. I will say though, on my mage I did find it harder to make money as I wasn't able to sell magicka potions and buying spell books does get costly. Also, if RP'ing, I didn't have a fence to sell stolen items too so was staying away from those as well. But I was still able to afford the Whiterun house which is all you need in the game (get the enchanting table mod from Nexus).

I hope we will be able to buy and fix up Helgen....with all the fixens'.