To the OP, the best advice I can give you is try and find a good LS. What server are you on anyway?

If you are running leves, or just solo grinding I would recommend trying to do that with a party, you can take our mobs faster without fear of dying. The dev team stated that they wanted solo fights between you and a same ranked mob to take around 30s - 45s and finish with half your life. So that's to be expected.

My best advice would be to pick up a wand for CNJ and/or THM from a vender in the city and level those to 4 to learn cure. I would also level pug to 6 to learn second wind. With cure and second wind you will increase your survivability (sp?) and increase your xp gain.

When you party and chain/link the xp goes up rather fast. And quests tend to give nice boosts to xp as well. I haven't run into any issues, but again I don't have any classes below level 10, so that one part of it.

Further more, the game is balanced for gear with at least one piece of materia, and until that gear starts showing up on the market you're better off picking up a crafting class and doing some crafting leves to help out with your money issues.

Hope any of this was a help.