Also, the biggest consideration when talking about what gear is required for quality recordings, there's really only one that can arguably be presumed to be advised early on. That is your monitoring situation.
If you are mixing on headphones or computer speakers, or generally any type of consumer-level general listening device, you are not hearing the full picture of what's actually going on in your mix.
This is a huge limiting factor because if you cannot hear the problems in the mix, you have no way of knowing that you need to address them, thus, you are not learning and gaining experience by doing so.
With that in mind, if applicable, the next purchase you need to be looking at is not upgrading your microphone, but buying a pair of studio monitors. These are made specifically for reference with flat-response, so that no frequencies are exaggerated or inadequate and you hear an accurate representation of what's going on in your mix.
The degree to which this is effective largely relates to the quality of the monitors themselves, which is also proportional to their price.
However, you are still in far better shape by having budget reference monitors than having none at all.
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