Careful Conservative with debts hiding gold trinket initially (8)
I believe the answer is:
cautious
'careful' is the definition.
(synonyms)
'conservative with debts hiding gold trinket initially' is the wordplay.
'conservative with' becomes 'c' (I am not sure about this - if you are sure you should give a lot more credence to this answer).
'debts' becomes 'IOUs' (promises to pay debts).
'hiding' is an insertion indicator.
'gold' becomes 'Au' (Au is the chemical symbol for gold).
'initially' says to take the initial letters.
The initial letter of 'trinket' is 't'.
'c'+'ious'='cious'
'au'+'t'='aut'
'cious' placed around 'aut' is 'CAUTIOUS'.
Can you help me to learn more?
(Other definitions for cautious that I've seen before include "Tentative" , "Careful, shrewd" , "Careful to avoid danger" , "Prudent, slow to take a chance" , "safe" .)