To all those throwing stones about why it wasn't right to start with: you cannot spend $500 and get $1500 build quality. Not rocket science. Also, the business model taught by the esteemed (by some, not me) Harvard Business School has evolved from the Quality First, to spend less on QC/QA and deal with customer problems through customer service. Whereby Toyota went from the hallmark of quality to recall city. It absolutely amazes me how ALL corporations throw common sense out the window and follow this dogma like lemmings because of the promise of higher earnings predicated on all kinds of statistical analyses and projection charts. And every seven years or so they change so they can sell "something new" to a whole new group, which always works. Fortunately some do follow through with the customer service part.
To anyone else looking to minimize potential losses when starting out: First, buy a good used gun and take care of it and you can very likely sell it for what you have in it if you change your mind down the road. Second, you do NOT need an O/U to do anything. A good quality repeater beats a cheap O/U every time. Third: repeaters are much more easily and cheaply modified as to fit if that is an issue. You can buy a cheap used stock off ebay and hack away at it, install recoil pads and what all, and if you sell the gun later put the original stock back on it and you are only out the cost of the used stock, which you can usually also sell to someone else with a similar problem.
Beretta should get the kudos, since they own both Stoeger and Benelli. While the various branches can at times be less easy to deal with than Remington or Mossberg, you can usually get them to come through.