Here’s a couple of things I picked up during my playthrough of GTA V that may (or may not) help you not lose hair/sleep.
- $$$ is pretty hard to come by until you finish the game pretty much – don’t spend on unnecessary (and expensive things). Properties can wait until you’ve got mad bank at completion.
- Everyone loves a modded car – I recommend that if you are modding a car, do it on the signature car of that particular character; that means the strange jeep for Trevor, the ugly red sedan for Michael. This doesn’t apply as much to Franklin, because he has the option of buying a Los Santos Customs franchise (which is the only property that is worth it early in the game IMO) and get all mods for free from that outlet (which is unfortunately out in the boondocks).
- A fully set up car will probably set you back around $100k – Even when modding ONLY signature cars to avoid the disappearing cars in garage bug (which may have been fixed with 1.01), there will be a couple of times where you’ll need to re-modify your ride. For Michael, your ugly red family sedan is switched for another car about midway into the game. For Trevor, for some reason, even though you retain the exact same car/jeep, there’s a point in the story where there’s an emotional break-up between you and Michael (no, I don’t consider this a spoiler and I left it vague anyway) and strangely all your mods vanish.
- As per most other sites recommendations, I’d advise you to avoid Lester’s assassination missions until after you’ve completed the game to maximize returns. On the non-optional assassination mission (that is required to progress the story), the stock that you can buy stops going up after about 1 or 2 missions/saves. Ditch it… it doesn’t go up after that, and if you don’t monitor it, you’ll end up making losses instead.