My advice would be this.
If you already own some hardware go for it.
But never buy hardware just for mining, the money is better spent just buying coins. Basically this is because you are getting the coins now rather than slowly over time so you get any growth in the coins from now, rather than when you mine them.
I mined btc when gpu mining first became available, some scrypt when gpus started on that, and I have a butterfly little single. In the latter two cases I would have been better off just buying some coins. In the first case it was still quite hard to buy so I had no choice but to mine (if it were possible to buy and I had of sold my graphics card and bought $200 worth of bitcoins I'd be a millionaire now
) . The only example of people doing better off mining than buying are the people who got in first on the ASICs, i think they actually made more mining than buying, but I can't think of a single other case.
The only benefit of mining is that if crypto-currencies collapse you've still got some hardware you can sell, but really if you think that's going to happen the smart thing to do is not spend any money on anything.