How much gold should we take into Cataclysm?

I bet a few are thinking now “what a silly question! As much as possible of course – you can never have enough gowld!”.
In fact you can, or at least I think I can; gold has never been of any further interest to me in WoW than getting me to where I’m going and pay the bills (most of which are raiding related). Money is boring and frankly, it’s already too big a fuss in the real world – I don’t need to dedicate time on it in a game as well. Because of that, the whole money game and auction house-mania has utterly passed me by all these years. I get no kicks from things like profit or bargains and really, I can afford the things I need and there’s precious little that I want that can be bought (and if it is, I have it by now). My ultimate question about my ingame currency is always “what items can it get me?” – it’s not there to look pretty, is it?

I’ve always been a little baffled by the concept of “unlimited wealth”; it’s probably my pragmatic side but I see no point in having more money than I can ever spend in a game. It’s not like I can pass it on to my children or something. It becomes an abstract number and since ‘the gamble’ doesn’t hold any fascination for me either, I never gave money-making much thought in the past. Sure, I’ll sell some welfare epics if I happen to get them, it’s fast and requires zero effort (also, what else should I be doing with them?). It’s the same with me and cars, if they get me from A to B, I care very little about the rest, they’re just a functional tool. I have a lot of love for the shinies otherwise, but goldmaking and cars aren’t two of them.

That said, there’s been one moment during my WoW career when I was struggling for cash: when I couldn’t afford the epic flying mount start of WotLK. It’s rather ridiculous to be short on cash in WoW and I’d never claim it’s hard to generate, but like I explained before, I was never the player to care about goldmaking just for the sake of it. So when WotLK hit, I sat around 3k gold because I had done more or less nothing but raiding and PVP in TBC. I had also not properly informed myself about how much the whole cold-weather and epic flying deal would cost in the upcoming expansion. My fault obviously and so I ended up taking a loan to afford birdie straight away (which I have since paid back in numerous ways /cough).

I do learn from past mistakes…sometimes. This time around, I will be prepared when Cataclysm throws its 5k+ at me to fly around Azeroth at 310% speed. This time around, I could even afford to pay this amount of gold several times without it impacting on my small change for covering everyday stuff. But it’s more of a tribute to WotLK than my trading efforts really: it has been insanely easy to fill your pockets in this expansion. I’ve not done much besides raiding this time either, but the epics, orbs and saronites from badges made all the difference and there was nothing else to do for me with all the extras (I don’t gear up alts). I wager that Blizzard being aware of their players’ general cash influx, have more than just Azerothian flying in store as goldsink in Cataclysm.

So what do you reckon, how much cash should we take into Cataclysm? Not from a greedy goblin’s point of view, but a pragmatic AH-lazy person’s perspective? Is 15k gonna be enough, or aim higher?

Are you prepared?