Hey Mike, welcome aboard. In general, purchase the best you can afford. In some cases, buying a used camera and especially used lenses, will stretch your dollars the furthest. Consider what your friends / family own as you can share equipment and knowledge, when possible. If you don't have others to leverage, visit a store and handle the candidate models as there are subtle (and very real) differences in size and button layout that may catch your attention when handling the camera body. Consider your intended purposes. If you don't have a family member in competitive sports or a wildlife center near by, you probably don't need to pay extract for a camera with features like 10+ frame / sec shooting.

I'll leave it to others to start the shouting match of vendors, bodies and lenses. All of the candidates from Sony, Nikon and Canon are excellent choices, up and down their current family of bodies. None of these three companies are going anywhere anytime soon. Mirrorless is the trend of the future, but none are there yet for sports and wildlife. Sony has been pumping out lenses because their weakness is a limited lens line-up. Nikon and Canon continue to pump out relatively cutting edge bodies and lenses as well as having an extensive back catalog of lenses covering every need identified in the industry over the past 40+ years.

The best pricing is available on the internet with some vendors specialized in used or refurbished models / brands. The internet is the best source (only in most cases) for specialized or very-high end equipment.

Here's one you might like to check out: Panasonic lumix point-and-shoot digital cameras are known among camera enthusiasts for reliability and innovative features. The lumix dc-zs70 brings the legendary optical performance of a 30x (24-720mm) Leica DC vario-elmar lens with amazingly stable 5-axis hybrid o.I.S. (Optical image stabilizer) to a highly portable point-and-shoot travel camera. Traditionalists will love the hands-on manual feel of a lens-mounted control ring, plus the familiarity of an eye-level electronic viewfinder. The modern enthusiast will love the Wi-Fi mobile device controllability and next-generation flexibility that 4K video and 4K photo modes bring to the creative experience.