I need money, and badly. After a long look at youtube videos, I am still at a loss. I had to sell most of my stuff to travel to the story planet, and I don't want to be back here again. What is a good way to make money? How do yo make yours? Post your ideas!

Play operations and flashpoints. Sell crafting materials loot.

If you're still leveling you just need to do more missions.

Also PvP costs nothing and you can buy credit boxes with the warzone commendations.

PvP credit boxes is where I made most of my credits before I hit the level cap. After that I started doing dailies until I got a couple mill, then started flipping rare items on the GTN.

 

Make sure you pick up everything from drops and sell whatever you don't need, and don't forget to gear your companion as well as yourself. Better companion = less deaths. Less deaths = less credits spent repairing.

Pick up a crew skill or two that let you gather crafting materials as you encounter them (e.g. scavenging or archaelogy) then sell your piles of mats on the GTN. Quick easy way to make good money.

 

If you're doing all of the quests you encounter you should be making enough money from those and the mobs you kill to cover all of your costs. If you are so short that you have to sell gear to get to a planet, then you're spending your credits on something that you don't need to be spending them on. Armor mods can be bought from planetary coms which you get doing the heroics. Other gear can be picked up as quest rewards or drops from mobs. You shouldn't need to be really buying anything other than new skills as you level up.

I'd recommend doing dailies as well.

If you have enough Cartel Coins, you can flip a Pack from the Cartel Market. Basically, you buy a pack of the Cartel Market, then wait the 36 hours for it to unbind. Don't open it; instead, just leave it be. When it's unbound, you can throw it on the Cartel Market. A single pack generally goes for about 300k on my server (Ebon Hawk), and that's enough to cover your costs for quite a while.

 

Also, as mentioned, the fact that you're running out of credits means that you're spending credits on things you don't need. If you're not buying things from shops, then the culprit is probably your Crew Skills. The Missions take money to run, and in the early stages of the game, you don't actually have the money to be able to send your companions on crew skills constantly. If this is the culprit, then your only real choice is to stop crafting until you have significantly more money. I can tell you from experience that it is a money-eater, especially in the early levels, when you don't have much money; during that period, the outflow from the missions is often more than the inflow from quests and such, so you end up in just the situation you're describing. When I understood what was happening, I started transferring all my money from different characters to the one I was currently playing, so that they could craft at will. However, I accidentally deleted a character who still had all my money once, so I had to start from scratch. I ended up taking Slicing, and just not crafting until I'd gotten 60-80k in my pocket. Once I had that, I started crafting, and had no problems. I'd built up enough of a nest egg to pad my pocket, and the missions I was doing at the same time now had enough money coming in that I was able to keep my incoming cash roughly equal, if not exceeding, my outflowing cash from missions.

Doing side quests (especially heroics), dailies, flashpoints, space missions and pvp. If you focus on the story quests only (as currently encouraged by the double exp "weekend") you will soon run out of money to even buy skills after leveling up.

If you are doing most side quests aswell as the story quests you should not be running low on credits for the regular credit sinks that is travel and field repair costs. Like others have said sending out companions on too many missions early on in your're leveling stage can really drain your credits fast before you realise when your a new player so bear this in mind.

 

Always pick up the credits from mob kills picking up 100 or so credits each time may seem like a tedious thing to do but it all adds up and this will help cover your're repair and travel costs. Get in the habit of repairing regular as the cost esculates expontentially the more your gear has degraded, remember moddable adative gear costs more to repair that standard gear.

 

If this is your first char I recommend NOT taking a craft skill straight away and pick up three gather skills like scavenging, bioanalysis and slicing, that you pick up mats/credits from environment nodes without cost no need to send them out on missions just pick up as go along to start with. Slicing is basiclly free credits in a way that you pick from lock box and security terminal nodes in the environment and with the metals and materils from the other two just sell these on GTN for more credits. Once you build a nice nest egg of credits you can then start to consider a craft skill.

Edited December 1, 2013 by NOTACTICS

Gathering crew skills like scavenging (the metals sell really well on GTN) also treasure hunting, underworld trading, diplomacy & investigation. These give metals, schematics, and companion gifts which will all make money on GTN. I'd also recommend slicing because it's always money. Now granted, you won't make instant millions but you'll make more than enough to gear you & your companion & lvl up between 10-50