Just sharing, if you as a beginner what to do best with your money?

1) Collect all Blue equipments and sell back to Merchant
2) When you have enough golds, go to Auction House to search Gold Find + Stat equipments btw 5k-8k, which also can provide you decent atk/defense.
3) Repeat all the way until lv60 if you still can survive, basically somewhere end of difficult mode or early hell mode.

Upgrade Gem/Artisan/Storage only when you are rich enough and comfortable to do so.
Buy new set equipment only until you feel you are so fragile.

Auction House, personally for me is a great feature to remove the frustration of spend so much time on items hunt but no good return.