Ok, so I started playing AL a few hours ago. I made a mage, and reached level 8, did a bunch of the quests. Now I've reached a point where I got no gold, no health pots, and both my pets need to be fed. What do I do next?

Seems that in order for me to survive, I leak gold, i.e. I don't get enough gold to replenish what I spend. When I reached level 7 I still had a tiny bit of gold left and had around 150 kills and only 6 deaths. Now I'm level 8 and I have about 170 kills and 25 deaths, and whenever I try to fight more I die most of the time due to not having any health pots left. Not really sure where to go from here.

Have they made AL where you have to buy plat in order to make it past the first few levels? I'm not really sure what I'm doing wrong. In PL I'm a very successful player, have all the dragon sets, lvl76, etc. So all this hardship is new to me.