Your character can buy military-grade warships with pocket change. Pretending they are somehow financially unstable or not stinking rich is disingenuous.
I make this thread only because I've noticed a distinct trend in fleshed-out CMDRs - they're always some kind of grizzled person and emphasis is often placed on their mediocre, gritty living conditions. This doesn't make any sense, considering they could probably paper their ship's cargo hold with thousand-credit bills.
Why is everyone so obsessed with being grizzled and poor? Is it a projection thing? What does my character being a spoiled, irreverent rich brat mean for my real life personality?
My character started out as an Imperial Slave, having sold herself into slavery for the money needed for entry to the Pilots' Federation. (This was during the Alpha, Betas, and Gamma, as a way of explaining the frequent Commander resets.)
Once she'd finished her term of service, she was a struggling Commander... until she'd fully kitted out her Cobra III, and started BGS work. She was financially secure enough to occasionally make donations to brave freedom fighters resisting the cruel Galactic Federation... among other things.
About the time she started Buckyball Racing, she was wealthy enough to own several small and medium ships dedicated to racing, had established an "adrenaline tours" business out of MacKenzie Relay, she had reclaimed her family's small estate on Emerald, and had several Imperial Slaves who were willing to serve her for ten years in exchange for her paying for their education.
These days, I consider her to be a Patron in the Empire. "Team Stevenson" has grown from one brilliant technician with several assistants to a dozen specialists including a doctor, the estate has since grown by two orders of magnitude, Stevenson Whirlwind Adventures still does "adrenaline tours," but primarily pays its bills and maintenance via normal passenger runs and non-urgent deliveries, and she herself is among the idle rich, out exploring the far edge of the Galaxy because she can, not because she actually
needs the money.
This is all thanks to Frontier going all Monty Haul Campaign on mission rewards as a response to credit exploits, rather than fixing them and balancing risks, rewards, and costs in the game. I can only conclude that the Pilots' Federation is engaged in some extremely shady practices, in order to justify "You could buy your own ship for that!" mission rewards.
Now, personally I would
prefer to play a poor commander who has to decide over whether taking a risky mission is worth the money to upgrade the Power Distributor in her
only ship... but that hasn't described gameplay in Elite Dangerous since at
least 1.3.
