Also, go to Google and search for {your state or province or city and aquarium clubs} or aquarium societies. Visitors are usually welcomed at the meetings and you wouldn't be asked to join until after a couple of meetings, so you wouldn't have to join.

Not only do these clubs often have mini-auctions at meetings, but they almost always have at least one auction a year. If you can endure the big auction (figure an hour for every 60-100 items) there prices get a lot more reasonable at the end.

Sometimes you can phone or e-mail the club's contact person and just ask if there are members who would sell a few guppies to a bright, young aquarist. Of course, plan this out with your folks first. :)

Before you get any fish, please try that fish-less nitrogen cycle. If you would write it up, it would be so cool to have a first person account of that as a Guppylog log. (Heck, write a brief version here and submit a longer, more detailed article on with a photo or three, to the TFH magazine's young writer's competition.)

And if you are a student, see if you can get credit for it as an English essay or do it as an assignment rather than writing about something less of interest to you. Imagine the response in class when you note, off the cuff, it got published in-line. :)

Oh, and if you call up a guppy breeder and mention that you are looking for some guppies for about Feb 1, when your fish-less nitrogen cycle finishes, you will not believe how impressed they will be that a new aquarist is that together. ;)