Congratulations and welcome to the hobby.
For a quick start, you might consider a inexpensive Baofeng hand held 2 meter/440 transceiver (as cheap as $25 on Amazon). A bit tricky to manually program, but for about 1/10 the price of a name brand unit, it makes for a decent starter/spare rig. Should be good enough to hit local repeaters.
Repeater list :
https://www.repeaterbook.com/repeate...hp?state_id=55
jr