Was your first cartridge relatively expensive?

Thanks for the comments guys, I hope this thread will help other newbies as well.

I do not plan to buy locally as I do not like the dealer that sell the vinyl products I'm interested in. He'll rip me off enough to buy quite a few cartridges to play around with.

I do plan to spending time learning about things. I'm an avid reader of message boards. :D
It's a bit disheartening to know that a cartridge needs to be replaced about 1500 hours or so. Especially considering the fact that it takes about couple hundred hours of breakin.

So most of you didn't break your first cartridge or damage it because of your newbiness?

Okay, thanks to the advice that you guys gave, I think I am going to pursue this further. This might belong in another thread, but I've been looking at two analog rigs, one based around the VPI Scoutmaster w/Sig arm and other based on a Teres 160 w/Morch DP6. For some reason I couldn't find any comparisons on here, so I assume it might be a dangerous topic or something.

Anyhow, from what I've read, the Teres does seem to be the better table or at least the DP6 is the better arm. But I can basically get the Scoutmaster w/Sig arm, a Sumiko Blackbird, and a $800-1K phono stage for the same price as the Teres 160 w/Morch DP6. So the Teres rig would cost me almost $2K more. And even if I can afford the extra $2K, would I not get better performance by putting it into a better cart or phonostage? Any thoughts?

I might take up your idea of getting a Grado Black just to try things out and keep use it when I need to break in analog gear in the future. I would love to hear comments about the Teres 160. I'm still undecided.