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.

I used to salvage blue into essence, but as I proceed I see no point to collect materials and keep crafted useless items, i found sell it all back to merchant and buy everything in auction house is a much efficient way at early stage.

Collect gold, is a more stable way to go.
Maybe until level60 only can start for item craft.

with the around 120% gold find, at nightmare mode I can get at least 50k/hour act 2.
items that below lv59 are all worthless to craft honestly.

but you can try to salvage for essense in later game once you are good enough with your current wealth and plan to craft and sell rare in lv60 as your money making career.