Well, there are several strategies, but there are several items (gloves and girdles) in BG1/BG2 that will grant you a fixed strength of 18/00 or higher, more than with any other stat, so when I make a fighter character, I tend to put a medium-low score in strength and use the ability points elsewhere.

I fixed your quoting.

It's possible to get the girdle of hill giant strength from the adventurer's mart right after escaping Irenicus's dungeon and doing the circus quest if you pick up the right items to sell in those two quests. You can lower its cost to around 12,000 gold with 24 charisma (18 charisma + friends spell), which if I'm not mistaken, eliminates the need to roll super high str provided you can survive up to that point.

There are two other methods I can think of that let you get even more money earlier.

Illegal method: There is apparently a fence in the sewers beneath (I think) the Temple District where there is a fence you can steal from. All you need to do is have a thief or bard drink a few Potions of Master Thievery and then start selling and stealing some valuable item.

Glitch method: Make sure you have a potion and a gem in a character's inventory. Go into the character's inventory and have her drink the potion. While still in the inventory, move the gem into the spot the potion was in. When you unpause, the character will "use" the gem, lowering the size of the stack by one. Continue until the stack size underflows (you will know when this happens) and sell those gems for a lot of method. (This is actually my favorite way to get money, but it probably won't work in the Enhanced Edition.)