None of the patches did anything that effects the game economics.
1. It gets easier as you level because the quality of loot levels and increases in base value and your Speech skill levels for every trade transaction you make. Get a follower early in the game even if you don't want to use them in combat. You can use them as a mule to carry more loot when you reach your carrying capacity. When you are exploring an area you can order them to wait where they are and then order them to follow you again after you have cleared the area.
2. Keep a pick axe in your inventory. There are ore veins all over Skyrim and it's much cheaper to mine ore and smelt them into ingots to craft weapons and armor than it is to buy them. That will eliminate one potential money sink.
3. At Halted Stream Camp you can get a Transmute spell tome which allows you to turn iron ore into silver ore and silver ore into gold ore. Buy iron ore from every blacksmith and general goods trader that you encounter. Even with low level speech skill you can turn these over for a profit by using the Transmute spell to turn them into gold ore, smelt them into ingots, make 2 gold rings out of them, and sell them to a general goods trader or jewelry trader. This is also a good way to level your Smithing skill which will benefit any melee combat build. Because rings have little weight to them you can carry and sell them in bulk to general goods traders in excess of the gold they have by purchasing soul gems from the same traders to bulk up their gold reserves. This in turn can be useful to you if you want to level your Enchanting skill or just to collect souls to charge your enchanted weapons. It also helps you with the most profitable money making process in the game (see below).
4. By far, the most profitable transactions with traders come from selling custom made enchanted weapons. As Zoa noted above, the Banish enchantment is the most valuable enchantment that can be placed on a weapon, but weapons with the Banish enchantment wont show up in trader windows until you're around level 22. In the mean time Soul Trap is a good enchantment to learn since the easiest way to harvest souls is by killing them with a weapon enchanted with Soul Trap.
There are other ways to make money but that should be enough to accumulate a decent amount of gold over time.
Regarding getting a house, try not to get too focused on it. Until you can afford one, being a member of a guild will give you a place to sleep and a safe place to store your items until you can afford to buy one. Now that we can easily see the settings on containers using the Creation Kit, we know that cupboards, dressers, end tables, and wardrobes are containers that don't respawn their contents regardless of location so if you put your items in those types of containers in your guild that are not marked "Steal" they will be safe.
