At the risk of revealing how lazy I am, here's an approach that has worked well for me for over 10 years. I think it's a good way to get started on a budget.
Get the Lee Reloader single stage press and mount it on a bench of some kind. Retail is around $19.00. There's no great pride of ownership, but I've loaded well over 100,000 rounds on mine, from all the pistol cartridges for falling plate competition and plinking to many thousand 6.5x55, .260 Rem and 7BR for silhouette matches. When you outgrow it, throw it away or, better yet, give it to the next newby. We're just getting started here.
Get the Lee Perfect powder measure. It's probably around $20.00. Yeah, it's flimsy plastic. It works. It is every bit as accurate, by actual test, as any measure ever made. When you outgrow it...
You need a scale. If you go with a balance beam, get a cheap one. It will be used mainly to be sure that your below max loads are uniform. You'll eventually want an electric scale, around $100.
For goodness sake, get carbide dies and forget about lubing and de-lubing cases. A Lee set is as good as any for .45 Colt and includes the case belling and bullet seating dies.
Get the Lee hand primer tool. Follow the instructions carefully. This is the only way to go for priming. Lots of the benchresters use this cheap tool: about $13.00.
Wipe the fired cases with Hoppes on a rag until you get carpal tunnel syndrome and spring for a tumbler, around $65.00. The point is that the tumbler can wait, along with the progressive loader, the electric scale and even the dial calipers, chamfering and trimming tools, primer pocket cleaners and so on. (The point is to jump in and get started.)
Run the cleaned cases into the sizing/depriming die.
Then, run them into the mouth-belling die.
Prime them.
Dump powder, looking into each charged case with a flashlight afterwards. Do this and you'll never double-charge.
Seat the bullet with the die which also applies crimp.
Proceed to range.
Don't trim straight bodied pistol cases unless you are in high-level accuracy competitions and need to prove to yourself that it doesn't improve accuracy. It doesn't. They don't grow, either.
Don't chamfer case mouths unless you really don't have anything else to do. Do you think the factory does this? No. They smooth out and look nice after a couple of loadings anyway.
Don't clean primer pockets. It just doesn't matter. A famous benchrest shooter went for a season ignoring this step and found absolutely no difference in accuracy. I cleaned them for years because all the manuals said to. Then I started experimenting. Now, I don't do it. You shouldn't either.
It's easy to get anal retentive about handloading and it's all to no avail whatever when we're talking straight-walled pistol cartridges for shooting up through club level competition. Accuracy comes from tuning loads to the gun and that usually means finding the bullet it likes. The attention to detail should be applied to the area of safety and that involves using good sense and PAYING ATTENTION.
Don't forget the loading manuals. Don't forget to have fun.
Hope I didn't make anybody mad.
