You just need to make sure you have enough food and with alot of gold, its no issue.

I use Artmoney and it stays in the same place, not sure if it changes, depending on the choice of your nationality when starting a new game.

You just start Artmoney, start the game, load or start a new game, go back to the artmoney program, load the instance of the game, go back into the game, check how much gold you have, then go back to the program, search for it and then go back into the game and spend some of it, then continue to search.

I was lucky that each game i started, i was where i could get a ship upgrade, that took my money from 600 down to 100.

It seems that your crews' happiness/morale is tied to how much gold you have, so if you have a constant 1,000,000,000 gold, your crew doesn't seem to EVER lose morale, if they do, its so low, the face never stops smiling.