I'm at the part where you need to go to Skellige right after you help the Baron get his wife back. I went to Novigrad to get on one of the ships but the captain wants 1,000 crowns I just want to do the story no side quests.

In 1.06 this is actually quite easy, you can make enough money in Novigrad just by trading. Look for the Alchemist just outside of Novigrad at the Oxenfurt gate and buy all his gem dusts (diamond, emerald, ...) several times, by talking to him repeatedly. Then sell those to the Novigrad smiths - and you will make a profit! At least with the armorer at Hierarch square and the blacksmith at the fish market.

Do that a few times and you end up with the combined money of the smiths in your pockets, which should be several thousand crowns. If you need some extra coins, sell items to the alchemist, because he is accumulating money if you use that method and he buys virtually anything.

Hope that helps!

How short are you on gold? You can take a loan out from Vivaldi at his bank in Novigrad, which will get you a tenth of the way there. The other quickest way I can think of is to find a couple of Smugglers' Caches and sell the items you recover, which should net you gold very fast. If you haven't uncovered these locations of interest, just do a quick Google search.

I have like 195 G

Two or three contracts will get you your gold, and it's what a witcher does.

Sell all the crap you pick up. No reason to hoard anything. Just sell it. Plus do side missions. They are jobs which pay... DUH!!!

I hear you can slaughter cows in White Orchard for cash.

Yes you can. Very easy too.

You can just explore, loot, and sell. You'll get the gold in no time.

I was suggesting to plunder all smuggler caches in Skellige, but you are so broke that you can't even get to Skellige....
How is that even possible, I had almost 1000 when I got out of White Orchard.

Look around for "?" on map, go there, slaughter monsters/bandits, take all the drops and loot, sell it to merchant/blacksmith.
Kill spectres - they are leaving behind gem dusts which are one of the best merchandise in a game.
If you are more pacifist type (but. c'mon this is game about FIGHTING!) at the outskirts of Novigrad, there are plenty of bee hives. Just plunder them for honey combs and sell them.
Collect/buy all shells and mussels you find, dissasemble them at blacksmith (it will cost you like 2-3 crowns max) and you will get white and black pearls that can be sold for >150 crowns each.

****SPOILERS****





Don't worry - you only need that 1000 crowns for a short time. At the end of the journey to Skellige there will be an accident and the captain's body will be lying just down the beach from the ship. You can loot him to get your money back.

I'm always suprised to read that people have in excess of 10,000 coins at all times. I seldom had more than 2,000, except maybe near the very end of the game. I'm always buying shematics, or even alchemy ingredients when I'm too lazy to hunt them down myself. The pay for witcher's work is barely enough to cover the expenses of the trade. :) I don't like collecting vendor trash and carting it to the nearest merchant; that's tedious and not very witcher-like.

I had 20000 coins when I went to Skellige for the first time.
After a while in Skellige doing a good 75% of smuggler cache events I ended up having 60000 coins.
I have all recipes and all schematics I could buy.

I never went for smuggler caches if I had to go out of my way to reach them. I never found anything particularly useful in them except for items to sell. And, as I said, with the small amounts of money merchants have, selling items is a chore.