I'm a student programmer jumping into the bitcoin mining scene and need to start some where. I have $1500 cash can do PayPal so hmu with offers.
If you order from BFL, you'll be that far down the queue it will take until after the summer to take delivery and then difficulty will have risen so profitability will be very low.
You have a chance of ordering a batch #3 machine from Avalon, those will ship from April 5th, expect delivery a month later. Batch #1 and batch #2 have sold out, you might be able to buy up an old machine once they deliver. Avalon does not support the sale of pre-paid machines by changing the shipping address, even though some seller will tell you Avalon does.
http://launch.avalon-asics.com/You can also buy shares in ASICminer
The last 2 options are mostly BTC only, the only payment they take is in BTC so before you buy, you need to have those BTC funds ready.
And seeing the price of BTC has been going up so much in the last 2 months, a lot of people are filling their wallets with BTC to spend. The only logic thing would be to follow the herd and buy up $1500 in BTC and keep that ready to participate in future orders.
You could speculate that the BTC price will go down but last 2 months track record has proven me wrong, I did buy extra BTC
to pay for my Avalon order and the price was on the 7th of Jan $13.5/BTC. Today it's $30. Yesterday it touched $31.3
Instead of spending the BTC on an Avalon preorder that could pay itself back in 100 days, I would have had much more profit from just selling my BTC when it doubled...
Perhaps that is something you should consider: buy BTC now, keep it until the next preorder round, and if you can't buy a machine, sell the BTC for profit