I usually play on immortal quick small pangea, sometimes deity standard size and time.
I just don't pile up gold. I don't work gold tile early, just food and hammer and I love buying tiles, I want to work the best tile possible, so almost every gold I have early goes to buying tiles. therefore, I rarely have a pile of gold.
I tend to hard build everything, and take AI cities as my third or forth city, so rush buy buildings, settlers and libraries is out of the picture too, anyway I spent all my gold on tiles already. And it's just faster for me to hard build a settler than waiting to have that much gold, by then all the room for expand would be taken up by the AI (maybe it's because I play on small).
But if I do pile up some gold early, from getting lots of ruins or just meeting a lot of city states and there's no tile to buy, I'd spend it on a cultural or religious city state. The culture from cs is huge at that stage of the game or in case of religious cs I don't have to build shine early in my other cities, save up quite some hammer and maintenance.