It's always a debate whether to mine, or just straight up buy into cryptos with money. One feels like more of a risk and a mind f*** at the thought of losing what you just bought, but the other requires patience and can also drive you mad if your mining profits keep disappearing as a market corrects.
While I personally Mine with graphic cards, and every so often add another graphic card into the fray when Amazon or Newegg decides to firesale a good mining card for no apparent reason (like I bought an RX 570 on amazon two weeks ago for $240 CAD, which is quite low for a card that does $2 or even $3+ USD per day for a few dollars a month in electricity), I sometimes think to myself that I'm better off just spending the money directly on crypto. I think the only thing that stops me, is that I don't like my fiat money being tracked into a bitcoin exchange, as the future ramifications for tax purposes are an unknown. Plus, I've been mining a while, and started out with just a couple graphic cards. I prefer the thought that 2 years from now I can still be mining UBIQ or some other coin that isn't a pump and dump scheme.
That being said, I don't think it's too late to mine, there are a lot of different coins that are profitable on different hardware still and should continue to be. For example an AMD R5 1500x CPU is a quad core, 8 thread little monster that has 16MB of L3 cache. You can buy one for $165 USD right now. Monero requires 2MB of L3 cache per thread and the proper instruction set, which the Ryzen CPU's have. You can probably do at least 300 Hashes per second, which should get you 30+ dollars per month if Monero doesn't take a monumental dump, and at a very low power draw, lower than an incandescent light bulb.
How about a GTX 1050ti? It'll pay itself off in roughly the same time as the 1500X. Also very low power draw, and you can toss it into any old junker PC that has a PCI Express slot.
Food for thought. I'm not giving any advice, just throwing thoughts down. I may be a little biased toward mining because I do it, but every method of getting into crypto has risk.