Honestly I don't see any real problem here with paying 100 simoleons. I assume you're placing these food stalls because you want to learn the recipes, supplied by the various stalls ?
I am capped out on 9,999,999 simoleons, no cheats no mods. Earning money is the easiest part of this game.
If I may offer suggestions to the struggling poor people ? - Don't have kids right away, they will consume a lot of your time ( assuming you're trying to raise them right :P ).
1 - Try starting out as a creative type ( Creative, Perfectionist ) doing paintings and work on purely Abstract when you finally unlock them. I suggest joining the Painting career and work towards picking up the Marketable and Creative Visionary Traits as soon as possible.
2 - Visit the spice festival and harvest the dragon fruit, plant as many as you can and harvest / plant / sell the fruit to your hearts desire.
3 - IF.. you want to work on your Baking and IF ... you have the expansions / packs for the Ground floor Entrepreneurs Table or the Come and get it street store - sell here at a 300% mark up
Also these Tables allow you to sell any Food you make. The highest selling food I found was the Lava Bundt Cake ( Baking lvl 10). To sell your food, firstly " pick up serving " until all serves are seperately stored in your inventory then place them all into the Table's inventory. the Lava cakes were selling for me between 2.9k - 3.4k simoleons per serving.
Once you have enough revenue coming in complete the Fabulously Wealthly Aspiration.
This will allow you to earn simo's based on your standing cash every week... it will grow and grow until you are earning hundreds of thousands of simo's every week
I hope this washes away any money troubles you ever have again.
Gluck.
For me it's not the cost involved as my Sims are always prosperous but it's trying to create new, vibrant and functional community lots. For example roller/ice rinks and bowling alleys with food stalls, etc. Some of my festivals in the City Living world are bugged and crash on arrival. Newcrest doesn't have that problem so I've tried to give that a similar vibe as well as using up space and bringing life into an otherwise basic world. As well as that, staff don't always appear when hired and the fee is paid.
Yeah, I agree with @Drarcuul that it's really easy to make money in the game (steal the plants at the Romance festival and garden is also one of my go-to strategies, also the creative careers; the music licensing thing of one instrument per week is annoying but you can re-license the same song forever...), but... yeah.
The functional community lot thing. Yeah.
If you're not opposed to cheating, you could hire a vendor and then reimburse your Sim with cheats. I've been known to do that for items in rotational play where it's like, "Uhhh, yeah, you're installing LittleMsSam's automatic thermostat for ME, not you, so you can have your money back." Or "Oh look, the cat I spayed with cas.fulleditmode is in heat, you can take her to the vet and spay her and I'll reimburse you." Etc.
All that said, I do understand that if you're on console that takes away the chance to get trophies, which is a major bummer and you probably don't want to do that just so you can have a vendor at a community lot. ☹️
See first page hun...
