is this for a child, teen, adult? Electric or acoustic? Remember that a cheap guitar is going to be poor quality which will be difficult to play, and have the effect of discouraging the student. Cheap guitars are also quite painfully awful to a child's fingers! If you are an adult & this is for yourself, why don't you go to a pawn shop & look around. Are you in college? Perhaps your music dept has one they will loan to you. Do you have a friend or relative who might loan you one? A "cheap" guitar can be a couple hundred bucks in a music store or a catalog or even Sam's Club around Christmas for a basic dreadnought "kit" with a strap, a couple of picks, & extra set of strings. Then again, one might run across a guitar for $25 in a garage sale. Without knowing the actual situation, it is difficult to advise. Steel strings will be harder on the fingers, and if you get a guitar with nylon strings, although they are more difficult to keep in tune, they are easier on the fingers. A student model guitar-sometimes 3/4 size- with mylon strings can be found sometimes in catalogs for under a hundred bucks. When in college, one of my friends was wanting to learn guitar, but she didn't have the $, so I suggested that she blink her eyelashes at a cute guy in one of her classes & ask him to show her how to play his guitar. She ended up being a better guitar player than he was.