I just recently got into mining as well.  I bought 3 x Radeon 6950's on Craigslist for $450 and with an additional $450 in hardware I have a machine mining at 1050 Mhash/sec consuming 470w of power.  It was enough to get me going and while it will be a while until any profit comes out of the machine, it's still fun to participate.

I would recommend checking your power rates before making any decisions.  The rate you mentioned is very high.  I pay $0.105/KWh...that includes electricity, delivery costs, taxes and anything else that may get added on.