how do i practice without buying question banks?

Schweser or Elan works great. Those are the two I’ve used, but are many others (check here) that you can try out as well.

You definitely should use qbanks – practicing without Qbanks is like going to war without weapons. 

@trix 
We have a Level II Question bank currently in free alpha test mode that you may enjoy. So far we’ve gotten great feedback from the forum on it.
https://cfa.adaptprep.com/