The one thing you DONT want to do, is invest your money in a speculative TLD or IDN, especially when you just left the starting gate, stick with .com, .net, & .org's for now, then when your better established, you can venture off into other TLD's.
I would focus on buying some revenue generating domains to keep you a float, the money you earn from parking will allow you to buy more domains and build your portfolio......Good luck!
Obviously this person has very limited funds. So...buying "revenue" generating ASCII domains is probably not going to happen at reg fee.
My recommendation as stated above is to speculate a little bit (lets say he is buying 10 domains for $70). Buy 8 ASCII domains...and maybe 2 IDNs. The IDNs still available today are pretty awesome names, browser support for them is just around the corner, that is clear.
In the last few days I registered zoo.com in Thai, and digitalcamera.net in Arabic, and jade.com in Japanese.
I think that for my $ 20.97 investment there is some pretty good upside, don't you think?