Don't get to caught up in buying tools, they are only there to help you, not to do everything. For people starting out I would recommend building links manually. That way you can appreciate the tools more when you use them, and understand the monotonous tasks the software is saving you from doing yourself. Anyway here's my "must have" tools and service recommendation.
Scrapebox - $57 - Blog commenting, scraping links and pinging
GSA Search Engine Ranker - $89 - Add juice to power lower tier links
Instant Link Indexer - $13.77 - To make sure Google crawls and hopefully indexes links
I would recommend creating blogs on free web 2.0 blog platforms (blogger, wordpress.com, webs, tumblr, weebly) and send links to the articles posted using Scrapebox and GSA SER while indexing all the links (money site and all tiers) using Instantlinkindexer. I've used this exact method for my lower competition keywords and I always see decent results after a couple of blasts.