The Elder Scrolls V – Skyrim: How to Make Easy Money

In The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim for the PC, PS3, and Xbox 360, having money can make or break you, especially early in the game. There are weapons and armor to buy, houses to purchase, soul gems to hoard, the list goes on and on. So how does someone keep up in this money driven world?

The simple answer is through Enchanting. Enchanting is probably the single best way to make gold in the game, even without spending very many points on perks.

Enchanting can take the crappiest weapons in the game, and turn them into piles and piles of gold, so lets explore this and you’ll see what I mean.

Making Money With Enchanting

The key to making a lot of money with Enchanting is to first find a weapon with a high priced enchant on it, and disenchant it at the Arcane Enchanter. Banish is the single best enchant for this trick, and can easily net you 1000 gold per enchant with very little investment.

First, save up some gold for a weapon with Banish on it. These weapons run around 4,000 to 5,000 gold or more. Also, save up some money for petty, lesser, and common soul gems. It’s easier if you can buy them pre-filled, but buy the empties as well. Also, buy a bunch of iron ingot and leather strips to make as many iron daggers as you can, or just save all of the weapons you find in dungeons because you’ll need them later.

Now you need to find a weapon with Banish on it. The trick to finding a weapon with Banish is to use the trick to reset a merchant’s stock. All vendors restock every 48 hours, so go to a weapon vendor and check their stock, and then wait 48 hours if you don’t see what you want, and then look again. I personally did this outside of Warmaidens in Whiterun, because he typically has a fair amount of enchanted weapons in his stock. The weapon won’t be called “of banish” or anything, so make sure to read the text of the weapon. It will say something about banishing Daedra up to X level.

**Note – If you are a lower level character, you may have less chances to find a Banish weapon. Instead, try to find a weapon with Paralyze, or a drain type of enchant. These won’t net you as much, but you can still gain a lot of money with them.

It may take a bit of time to find your Banish weapon, but when you do, take it to the Arcane Enchanter and disenchant it. Make a bunch of iron daggers with iron ingots and leather strips, or stock pile weapons from dungeons, and enchant them with the Banish enchant. You’ll watch a 10 gold value iron dagger go up to 1,000 gold or more, depending on the soul gem you use. It’s best to use your lower gems on this, since the value doesn’t increase that much with better gems.

Equip your best bartering gear and sell your enchanted weapons to the vendors for a huge profit. I always carry several banish weapons around, since you can essentially “trade” them to vendors by simply buying something you want from them to increase their available gold, and then selling the daggers to them to get your money back.

Make More Money With Speech Skills

It helps tremendously to have the Merchant perk in the Speech tree (level 50 speech required), which allows you to sell any type of item to any vendor. The Investor perk helps as well (level 70 speech required), which allows you to give a vendor 500 gold to permanently increase their available gold supply.

Check out my other guide if you want to learn how to raise Speech quickly.