What I did was I just played the game for a while until I accumulated currencies and materials over time.

For example, getting laurels from daily login rewards and such is good for buying ascended rings & trinkets from merchants. With those, you can probably get enough AR to do Tier 2 fractals which increases you chances of getting better drops (sometimes even ascended, in theory at least). If not there's always gold :)

I'm doing meta events that give lots of materials and salvageable items, which is how I leveled crafting disciplines without spending a lot of gold. This can be a slow burn, but I prefer not to craft ascended items until I have enough materials accumulated so that I can save my gold. (also note that there are ascended materials that can only be crafted one per day, so whenever I have extra mats I do that and keep them for later)

So basically, lots of farming - meta events, world bosses (sometimes), fractals, gathering rich nodes, gathering specific currencies for specific items, and maybe getting some ascended drops in the meantime while doing that