Who advised you against a complete kit?
1. HOw much are you willing to spend?
2. How much time do you have on building a kit?
3. Upgrading down the road.

1. If you have money to spend, if you go the buying everything seperate your looking at about 200 dollars more than one of the RTF kits. Depending on the size of the engine and radio you buy.

2. Do you have alot of time to build a kit from scratch? If you have time to spare and are patient and love to build...then don't get an RTF kit if you want the experience to build one. If you just want to get in the air and start learning to fly...go the RTF route, I have found that it is kinda hard to get instructed flight times especially in the winter, would hate to have spent 4 months building something only to not be able to get trained on it nad then throw in the fear of crashing. If you JUST want to learn to fly, a possibility is duraplane, believe they say that they will replace their airplanes if you destroy it before learning to fly.

3. Upgrading, What would your second plane be? Could you use the engine in your trainer for it? The servo's? If you plan on doing this then you would probably want to buy your stuff individually, like a better engine for the most part. I found that i will most likely just buy a futaba flight pack, -$130 bucks, another o.s. 46fx engine-$109 but with my discount at the LHS i am looking at about $200 total. For the fact that i want to keep my trainer ready to fly. But that is my choice, so answer these questions for yourself. Also, I had bought a 6 channel radio, not computer but a 6 channel radio none the less, sure it isn't computer but does give me plenty of options down the road. So what you need to do is start answerring some questions for yourself on what you expect to do down the road in this hobby and what you want to do for now.

Answer these questions for yourself and you should have a clearer image of what to do.

Just my thoughts