I'm a newcomer to crypto. I've spent a couple of months reading up on it, and at this point I feel like I've got a decent grasp on "how to do it" ahead of my first purchase, which is coming up soon. I believe the time I put into learning before actually buying was worth it.
From what I've gathered: NEVER, under any circumstances, send funds straight from the place where you bought the crypto, even if they seem to let you do that. JUST DON'T. I don't know the exact reason, but that's the advice the experienced people gave in what I read, so that's good enough for me. Instead, get yourself a separate wallet (I went with Exodus).
Here's how I started. I opened a second checking account through my online banking and got a debit card attached to it (this one is only for crypto funding, so it stays easy to track and separate from my regular banking). After that I set up the Exodus wallet (write down the 12 word secret key). Setting up a wallet requires zero crypto knowledge or crypto actions.
I had an old PayPal account, and I used it to buy PayPal's stablecoin PYUSD, then sent that over to Exodus, which meant converting it to UDST and so on once it was in Exodus. Going forward, I'll just use Coinbase since it seems simpler. I'm not investing in or holding crypto, only making purchases and moving under $150-200 at a time, so that suits me.
IMO the simplest path forward would be opening a free Coinbase account and funding it with the debit card. Then send that over to Exodus. There are other "moving parts" to learn about, but it turns out to be fairly straightforward once you get a feel for the moving parts.
