Strategy for the broke...
i) forget directly mining bitcoin for the minute
ii) scrounge up some Radeon GPUs at low prices from local craigslists and other classifieds, everyone "knows" about 6950s, 5850s, 7950s etc, so maybe go for the less popular ones. Since 400kh GPUs are going at near $200 and 600kh near $300 and up, then finding ~200-300kh GPUs at $100 or less is a DEAL, so try finding 6850s, 6870s, maybe 5770s
iii) scrounge up some motherboards to run them in, here's what you need in your fancy mining rig, PCIe slots, period. Doesn't need to support haswell, doesn't need overclocking features, needs PCIe slots, there's some socket 939 and 775 boards that do just great. Scrounge up the slowest lowest watt CPU you can to stick in the board. Scrounge up 2GB of RAM. Scrounge up a PSU that on 12V gives you 100W for the motherboard and CPU and 150W for each GPU AT LEAST. So minimum of around 40A on 12V for a celeron 440 in a s775 board with 2 6850s. (I have that setup, I've got about $300 in it, makes about $500 a month @ 550kh for about $40 worth of electricity)
iv) set up per
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=117221.0 set up on litecoin first and use a MAJOR pool such as wemineLTC familiarise yourself with how it all works, get your miners tuned up so they are getting in the same zone as the top hash rates shown on the litecoin mining hardware guide, then when you know what you are doing, start with the alternative coins. Last thing you want to be is a newbie mining a flaky coin on a flaky pool with flaky hardware and a flaky software config.
v) when your coin is high against bitcoin, sell it for bitcoins.
iv) be ready to abandon any coin that doesn't make the top 10 in market cap (Excluding ripple) if it's high market cap and "not real good at the moment" you can mine a bunch for a nice stash to sell when the price is better, don't count on doing this for low cap coins, they may never recover. This depends on whether you can afford to cover your electricity monthly and get big payouts a few times a year, if you need monthly payouts go with most profitable at the moment.