Mercantilism DLC.

Become a shop or tavern owner. Invest in your city and other cities. Operate a trade caravan. Start up a mercenary company like Blackwater to protect wealthy clients/dignitaries, and accompany your men on security details, pay their wages, buy their equipment, etc. Purchase and repair a ruined bandit fort for trade route security and watch as a small settlement springs up nearby, road traffic increases, etc.

There are a trillion things you could add to this game if you're looking for a money sink.

inflation has actually gone down in Tamaril,i'm sure it was 10.000 to buy that little shack in Oblivion ,now it's only 5000 to buy a rather nice house in Whiterun.

2000 for the shack. Damn, I remembered that far too easily. I should probably cut down on TES games...

Brothels are a great idea actually! Desele's House of Earthly Delights perhaps? Her descendants could have set up shop in Skyrim after the Red Year.

I loved Side's Sailing Ships mod in Oblivion for giving me a reason to save up my cash. The cheapest little dingy was around 8k, and the largest Elven Galleons were over 200k. Collecting the whole fleet would have set you back well over half a million septims.

Luxury shops where you can buy

- aesthetically pleasing house interiors, more weapon stands, book shelfes, ...
- rare ingredients
- rare potions that have that extra kick
- rare equipment
- enchantment services,

and don't forget to buy the spot in a caravan which will then take you with them (=fast travel).

The main problem is everything in the world is so cheap and there isnt much need to buy things, what we need is a probably going to be a few mods we had in the past games. First off a living economy mod to make buying/selling and trading far more important, raise the cost of everything in the world from items to bribes, rooms at the inn, hired companions... EVERYTHING by 10 and lower the resale value of items by half along with many other tweeks to make it feel like a more real world economy with city's and villages trading resources and traveling merchants having an impact on things, shops you an invest in or own and many other things like investing in guilds or whole city's etc etc.Remove fast travel and put more wagon trails in alone with raising the cost of wagon travel and the cost to buy a horse of your own as well as giving owned horses an upkeep cost in the way of food and maybe even the need to be re-shoed after a while etc. Give just about everything in the world an "upkeep", weapons and armor needs to be repaired with the right ingots etc, houses have upkeep maybe city taxes and other things.

Next we need a realism/survival mod to add the need for rest,eating and many other needs like item repair etc, have this even effect pets and companion's and hourse's etc, the need to eat and feed your dog or horse or spouse, add in a fatigue system that factors in eating/rest and long distance travel by foot to increase the need for other means of travel and a need to eat/sleep etc. More things to do in taverns like gambling/drinking games and ... other things. There were some really amazing mods for oblivion that when combined made a need for gold and trading vastly better.

I like the idea of investing in guilds/towns, it could be used in 2 ways, for guilds you could have a rival guild who you want to attack but need to recruit a suitable force AND kit them out to have a chance at beating down the enemy guild, each sucessful campaign would allow you 'rank up' in the guild starting with you accompanying a small force where you make the difference in the fight, followed by a promotion, then you would be needed to kit out some of the men and find a few recruits, win that battle get promoted to team leader, where you recruit and kit out your own skirmish team, attack .. win, promotion, lead a company of men on a direct assault, win promote, working up to a final super awesome (hard) battle to win the enemy guild leaders head and take over thier fort/castle.

Once this has happened (which should take a huge amount of cash and work to achieve) you would be able to start upgrading your fort/castle to repel other guilds attacking you for the same privalidge. This would be on ongoing and fun (if done properly) gold sink, you may even lose the fort and have to try and retake it.

I have about 63k? waiting to get 100k for achievement...then just gonna buy a ton of houses lol