I can’t understand the new economy

I’m new to the game and so far I’ve been practicing by playing a few campaigns with Portugal. I’ve never gone past 1500 because I really want to focus on the details and be as good as possible in the early game.

Now patch 1.1 came out on Steam and the economy is a complete mess. I can’t get a positive balance, I destroy all the forts, set good privileges, put fort and army maintenance to the minimum, and even then I’m always between -8 and -2.

I’m starting to go crazy with this — can anyone help me and tell me what I should do? 😅