Perhaps you have been waiting for the perfect radio and have been doing extensive (or should I say VERY extensive research) before getting out the check book.
It is even worse!
I'm British and got into ham radio in 1968-69 during vacations spent in America (during the heady days of the first Moon landing). My dad had been transferred to Washington, DC, for one year and my parents gave me a Heathkit ham radio initiation package. It include three ARRL books ("How to Become a Radio Amateur", an ARRL Morse Code book, and the ARRL Licence Manual). There was also a Heathkit kit for a code oscillator, and a set of LPs for Morse training, literally recorded by Farnsworth himself IIRC.
After reading the "How to Become" book I became determined to build an entire homebrew station myself rather than buying equipment off-the-shelf (or even buying kits). Unfortunately, the designs in "How to Become" are actually quite hard to build, for a 12-year-old! After returning to England I tried to build the receiver and transmitter but got nowhere: there is quite a lot of metalwork involved, and the components were not cheap or easy to find.
I did take (and pass) the UK Radio Amateurs' Exam a couple of years later, but still had not managed to put together a usable homebrew station. I had built a Top Band (160m) transmitter (but no receiver) and by then I was 14 years old, the hormones kicked in and my teenage self lost interest in radio for a while.
Fast forward 40 years to 2012-14 and I actually ended up building that very same station (see the separate thread in the Homebrew sub-forum here at eHam; the thread is called "Greetings"). Here's a picture of my station:

Looking back at what happened 50 years ago, the trouble is that it really was quite hard for a total beginner (literally a Novice in those days) to build these radios even though they were in fact quite primitive.
Anyway, with any luck I will soon be getting that rig on the air. It is a very cool hobby regardless of one's age!
73 de Martin, KB1WSY