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

In The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim for the PC, PS3, and Xbox 360, gold (aka septims, money, etc) is a hot commodity. Vendors all over Skyrim sell some nice enchanted items that are hard to reproduce even with maxed out Enchanting, not to mention the high cost of soul gems from vendors and the high cost of houses, so how does someone keep up in this gold driven world?

The simple answer is through Enchanting. Enchanting is probably the single best way to make gold in the game, even without spending points on perks. Enchanting can literally increase the value of some items by over 100 fold with the right enchants.

Banish = Lots of Gold

The key to this entire trick essentially is the Banish enchant. Banish is a fairly rare enchant that you can find on some vendors, and the item will be very expensive to purchase, but think of it as an investment, because once you have it you’ll basically be printing your own money. You’ll have so much value in items, the vendors won’t be able to keep up.

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.

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 nearly 2,000 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 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 my money back.

Increase Gold Earned 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.