I got into programming partly because I didn't have a lot of money. My parents were smart enough to recognize that having at least one computer in the household was incredibly important, but that one computer happened to be a good decade out of date. One of those "I saw this at a yardsale and picked it up for $50s" deals", the type of machine I use as personal mailservers/spaceheaters these days... I sure couldn't game on it, so besides using it for word processing and research, I learned how to program on it. I grew sick of win95, and nothing else would run on it, so I learned how to put linux on it and use that.

Anyway, my point is this: My current machine I do most of my work on has 64 GB of ram and 32 cores, but you absolutely can get into computing with the kind of money you can earn on a weekend mowing lawns.

(And yes, I was born before 1990. Not everyone in college knew how to program already, but all the kids who made it through the weedout courses sure did...)