I find the rich kid thing funny... I've never made more than 10,000 a year and my parents never gave me shit until this past few months when it got so desperate trying to find a job that it was either homelessness or moving back in with my dad for a while.
I bought my first Digi for $200 with money from work.
The next one was a Sony F707 that I bought for $400 under retail through a price match scam that people were running on sears through a dodgy NY website.
Then my first DSLR was a $1500 Sigma SD9 that I got for free thanks to a bug I found in Paypal back in the day: If you had a zero balance on the linked credit card, and a zero balance bank account linked, Paypal would not check the balance of either before allowing you to make up to $2000 in purchases. It would credit the seller, so they got all their money fine, then start bouncing back and forth trying to charge the bank then the credit card. By the time it stopped going through I already had the camera, and since Paypal was not a lending institution at the time and there was no agreement to pay money which they had essentially given to me, I never even received a bill from them. It was nice, one of my friends tried it recently and it doesn't work anymore.
Finally my current camera, bought with Pell Grant money (then I ate ramen for 2 months) and the whole host of <$30 lenses from the 60s and 70s.
Yeah, we ballin up in heeeya.