Well the easy answer is you have to have a place to keep all of your collection first. So I guess we bought our stuff first. You can build cages cheaper than you can buy them. I would suggest picking up some used cages at first that is what we are doing. Usually you can find someone who is upgrading caging and is willing to part with their older caging. As for snakes, We picked up some normal females. Craigslist does help with that if you can sex snakes well. But most of all pick up morphs that you like. Planning on turning money on snakes isn't all its cracked up to be. Most breeders that i know started off with a few morphs and a couple females and turned The money they made back into more snakes. That is the model im trying to follow breed what I like sell what i don't want to hold back and roll that back into more snakes that i like. Well i guess better caging comes along too. I can't wait to get my ars rack.