fav way to make money?

Like @lisamwitt I choose careers for Sims according to their story/personality.
But as for work/fun/reward ratio, my faves are Gardening (skill, not career) and Archaeology.

Fishing and gardening, but they can be pretty broken.
For fishing
1. You can get the aspiration trait where all bad moodlets just basically melt away when fishing
2. Ability to fish up Violins, they sell for 10,000$. It's from a specific spot, also its gives cowberries. (you can catch them both at lvl 1)

For gardening
1.Unlimited death flowers, so infinite revives
2.Have you seen how much dragonfruit sells for? It's an absurd amount

Definitely gardening.
If I start a new game I start it usually on spring and go to Willow Creek's cheapest neighborhood to get Snapdragons. Then I plant as many of them as I can and because they don't take a lot of time to grow, soon I can expand the garden. My Sim sells them for decent amount of money every day.
As soon as I get an announcement of Romance Festival I take my Sim there to get Birds of Paradise flowers and plant a lot of them. They will make my Sim rich quite fast so I can upgrade home or even the whole house. Usually I delete half of the garden later, I just keep few planters to have money flowing every day, depending on what my plans for the game play are.
If my Sim ends up being a gardener, then he/she will be super rich really fast, especially after he's able to get Dragonfruits. My favorite gardener Sim makes about 80 000 Simoleons every day (during autumn) with just them. His wife is a painter who paints a lot of masterpieces, so they and their 2 children are the richest family of all my saves.

Writing and gardening turn the tidiest of profits but painting isn't far off. From everything i read, gardening can turn the most profits by getting your gardening skill to 10 and then start grafting certain plants together to create ones that can be sold for a lot of money (as written by others above).

Writing can be time consuming, but if you keep at it you can make upwards of 8k to however much you want. however books you write and sell to publishers have a limited time window they sell for, so eventually you''ll need to replace any losses in book sales.

At first paintings don't sell for much, so you should level that skill up whenever you can to get the most out of your sims painting abilities, although collectively you won't make as much as writing from a single sim, you still make a tidy sum.

Always wanted to try out gardening.

Orchid gardens. Two million simoleons a week.

Careers. I love having my sims skill up or do other requirements in order to get promotions. The careers where we can choose to join with our sims are my favourite kind. I don't like freelance careers because they have no promotions or anything and that seems boring to me.

Mostly painting or writing. I like to have my future writer Sims complete the Painter aspiration when they're teens, because the aspiration reward allows not just painting any of the emotional paintings regardless of mood, they can write the emotional books (Romance, Playful Book, Sad Book etc.) regardless of mood. I do use some faster crafting mods (the ones I use just take out the distractions like staring off into the distance and such) so it doesn't take super-long. I keep most of the paintings in the Sim's inventory, so when they move out they can take them along then sell them to upgrade their starter home.

BTW, the Painter aspiration is one of the few that can be completed while still a teen if you work at it really hard and play on Long lifespan. Someday I'm going to have an author with their own bookstore where they can sell their own books so my other Sims can buy and read them, especially the skill books that can be written by Sims who've completed the Renaissance Sim aspiration.

"Kimmer;c-17197372" wrote:
Definitely gardening.
If I start a new game I start it usually on spring and go to Willow Creek's cheapest neighborhood to get Snapdragons. Then I plant as many of them as I can and because they don't take a lot of time to grow, soon I can expand the garden. My Sim sells them for decent amount of money every day.
As soon as I get an announcement of Romance Festival I take my Sim there to get Birds of Paradise flowers and plant a lot of them. They will make my Sim rich quite fast so I can upgrade home or even the whole house. Usually I delete half of the garden later, I just keep few planters to have money flowing every day, depending on what my plans for the game play are.
If my Sim ends up being a gardener, then he/she will be super rich really fast, especially after he's able to get Dragonfruits. My favorite gardener Sim makes about 80 000 Simoleons every day (during autumn) with just them. His wife is a painter who paints a lot of masterpieces, so they and their 2 children are the richest family of all my saves.

Isn't dragonfruit one of the small bush-type plants (rather than a tree)? You could transplant it to a small pot, keep it inside and get that money all year round. B)

All my sims are crazy about painting. The slightest inspirational mood will send them straight to the nearest easel (or home bar...they love their bars too). I usually have 4-5 easels in the house (in a combined paint/music "workshop"), so even guests can leave a painting once in a while. I also have quite a few writers. I don't really make much from gardening. Normally I have a greenhouse with only 1 of each plant/flower, and will harvest and keep almost all of it. For cooking or flower arrangements.

Other than painting/writing as hobbies, my sims usually have ordinary, boring jobs. Or not as boring when they are scientists/detectives or into conservation. I never really pick careers by how much they pay.

My faves are gardening and painting. Though admittedly, since the Freelance careers were introduced, I've been using them quite a bit too.