Like a lot of skills / crafts to some extent you can trade hours of experience for dollars. You will probably learn more and produce better joints by melting $

Like a lot of skills / crafts to some extent you can trade hours of experience for dollars. You will probably learn more and produce better joints by melting $50 of solder than buying a $500 iron. You "can" intermix real solder with lead-free but thats another skill type thing where you might be somewhat better off with one reel of leaded for rework. Assuming you get into rework. If you get into ancient Tek o-scopes you'll need solder containing a little silver, etc, there's an infinite variety to the hobby. Some fluxes turn into a sticky mess and you'll rapidly learn you need flux remover, so there is such a thing as "too much flux". One workholding tool you'll need if you get into thru-hole digital is a piece of wood the size of your pcb, you insert your sockets, place wood on top, flip over, wood holds sockets in place, solder away... If you don't understand the specs and limitations of your instrument, don't waste money on it. Find a guy who's into the hobby and has hand-me-downs and get your oscope that way. If you don't understand why you can't run full bandwidth on a 1x probe or coherently explain why you need a high BW scope you're mostly wasting money. On the other hand I am spoiled by mixed-signal oscopes that can decode I2C and many other protocols "on the fly" pretty cool. Likewise with power supplies, if you know why you need dual outputs, then you need dual outputs, but if you're not into that aspect of the hobby... likewise DC output over 18V or so, or currents over three amps, if you don't already know why you need that, you don't need that. I would suggest that "pretty much everyone" needs clip leads. You'll rapidly learn why some are unimaginably cheap and others cost $5 each, you can pay once for the tool or you can pay in frustration every time you use a tool LOL. (edited to add WRT the above, you'll rapidly learn the difference between low cost and cheap. A 1970s HP solid state scope is very low cost, but not cheap, for example. And a noob will not be capable of doing work that would have been cutting edge in 1975) But what do I know I only got started in this madness in 1980 by assembling a Heathkit AM radio kit, which still works BTW.