This is just a couple of things that I do when I start the game up and I've found that it's helped strengthen my characters and saved me gold:
1) Go to the places where you know there are health/mana bushes to harvest and stock up on potions for free as these replenish each time you start the game.
2) Replay the last area before you continue as this will help your characters to progress more quickly. There will be fewer monsters to kill and sometimes, the bosses are still there with goodies to plunder. Incidentally, don't bother going off the main path as all the barrels/baskets/chests, etc, that you looted last time won't be there again although some of the monsters may be.
Now then ... would this be considered gamesmanship as opposed to cheating? lol