I would recommend, as your first purchase, one of the popular R/C simulators, such as Real Flight or Dave Brown or one of the others. You can crash those models all you want and they'll just bounce back to life. The real models don't seem to do that...

Practice over the winter on the simulator, get really good at taking off, flying a pattern and landing, then make your second purchase. This would be a tank of gasoline to visit some of your local flying sites to look around, meet the instructors and get an idea what they would recommend as a first airplane.

After you "made your first 2 purchases", then is the time to actually invest in some sort of model.

Ask 20 modelers "what is the best plane to get", you'll get 100 answers!

Welcome! and good luck...