My understanding of the current way a lot of people (including RMT) are making money is through the following gardening trick.

1. Buy Wildgrass Seeds.
2. Plant them in 10 pots per character that you want to do it on.
3. Feed Water Crsystals.
4. Vendor the results
5. ???
6. Profit!!

No seriously, minus step 5. I looked into it about the resale value of the random crap you grow and you make more than you put into it. If you were doing this on an army of mules (which I have) you'd make several 100k a week for barely any effort.



As for old school when the economy was different. I used to...

1. Buy up a lot of zinc ore (100kish)
2. Have my wife turn it in on a mule in Bastok for Norg fame.
3. Buy the airship pass to Kazham (150kish)
4. I would Mazurka her level 1 all the way to Norg
5. Pick up Ninja scroll quests.
6. Walk the level 1 through them.
7. Mail the scrolls to one of my mules from Norg.
8. Delete level 1 alt and start over again.

This was back whn Utsusemi would sell for around the 1M mark and the other scrolls combined would hit about another 1M.

If we'd bought up zinc ore throughout the week on several mules we could easily make 3-4 trips on a single weekend in only a few hours time since we had it down so well. This would easily net us obviously several millions and the 250k spend on airship passes and such was a non-issue.