Its a good time to come back and buy into a considerable midlevel, item prices are at an all time low and its still early in the skilling up of the new looter skills. Still with 20k ped you can do a lot (wrong)!
Midlevel Hunting means your main concern must now shift from skilling offensive skills to the defensive skills, make yourself ready for a really, really intense and long period of gathering defence skills. With defence skills i mean evader profession and paramedic proffesion (bio is an option but not the one i would go for). If you are already level 30 hit profession, play your hit-prof up to level 60 then chip out only the primary hit-skill (rifle or pistol) and keep everything else and skill hitlevel all up again to 60. By then your dmg level should be bigger than your hitlevel and your defence skills should be around 2/3rd of your hit/dmg-levels or better. This will avoid crisis later, if you do it wrong the commando-hp will only expand your wrong expectations, but face it, you are still a defence weakling, so called nubah. But if you do the whole process to hit level 60 twice, you will be fine on the defence side of the hunting game. Expect a decade to reach commando, but when you do you gonna be tight as shit.
Id spent most of the peds for items:
-Mod EK2600 ~7.6k (or so) (hard part is to max it for a noob, but its easy compared to other tasks that gonna come)
-considerable armor worth ~3k ped (make it 4k with plates)
-Adj Military (and Hypercharged A105, buying is quite expensive, but super eco, still quite nice performance) OR Adj Meddox 4 (and way cheaper Beast amp, cheaper amp, but more expensive in use over HC A105, pop a reload pill and youre in click-click-click-heaven) 5-6kped
-rings is a must nowadays, but since you only got ~4k ped left you have to go for the imp version of Ares and Athena. But those rings really cant be big enough! Save on the gun, you can tier it later and invest in rings!
-tier up Adj Bukins Rifle to use it with range enhancers as tagger. Use it as your fall back option(since you are midlevel, you dont have the tagging gunpower to tag regenerating mob with so much power that they do not heal completely the tagging dmg before they reach you, So why not tagging them in a cheap way? A tagger is important on midlevel mob though, you cant afford having group therapy of mobs on you and fap fest)
all money left will be needed as turnover to make the whole thing run. And it might take 2k loss buyin to actually make it run, once it runs you couldnt care less for the money. Tier the shit out of your weapons and items, always run them on max performance tiered, dmg-enhancers and heal-enhancers. And basically be the Jimmy, the Star, the Vodka, Grave of your own level of gameplay. You always have to outperform other hunters of your level in your spawn. Yes you gonna lose more than they do in bad times, but hey you can stop right? If not you have to learn it! But the more tickets you pull the bigger gets your chance on the x5, x10, x20 loots, the multipliers that make you cash in enough money to make your equipment run. If you cash in these, run your equipment like a workhorse. Become the powerhouse of your own little world. Everything beyond, every hof out of the ordinary, is what you pay for better rings and CLDs and AUDs to make your gameplay more enjoyable.
Tune in, get sensible. Don´t mind the mocking of the jelous, the best ways to show ones teeth is to grin
If you dont like the game you play, quit it. Become your own book-keeper (if you cant keep things in mind do excel) and accept if the world sees days without any loot what-so-ever. Sometimes its better to shoot 100ped with Adj Bukins, than 10k peds with Adj/MImp/Mod whatnot. Dont get a quick-cash addict, but instead look for opportunities. A 2 % safe is often better than a risky 10%.
Always have fallback options. If ubahs dominate, play! but play out of their ligue, if loot is super-ultra-bad for you and your socm8s it means like some event like the Purger is just around the corner. If you still want to play, play ultra low and try to outperform other hunters in the spawn in one of both eco (time and resilience) or performance.
I know its just my version of the story