is there a read a.k.a guide on what this bare minimum is?
Ive played with the calculators and with my local kilowatt hour at .14 its calculating a $2800 profit annually per S7. Of course thats a "perfect world" scenario and in no way guarantees anything, but still keeps me interested and wanting to join the "rat race" for bitcoins.
But before spending actually $ on hardware, what do I need to know?
You need to use this calculator.
https://bitcoinwisdom.com/bitcoin/calculatorThe mining earning changes every 2 ish weeks, because the network re target the difficulty to finding blocks depending on if the network hashrate increased. If you look here;
https://bitcoinwisdom.com/bitcoin/difficultyYou will see that the difficulty has increased dramatically, so
if you input the difficulty increase at an average of 8%, you will see that you stand to lose a lot with your very high electricity rate.
You'd be better off using hosting services that does 0.08-0.09 and those are still expensive as they run at that cost to make money off you.