I chose the best insurance Geico was offering, covering everything including collision/theft. I think it's around $180.00 per year.
Inexpensive helmets here:
http://ironhorsehelmets.com/motorcycle.htm. No excuses, you can get a full face for under $100 if you shop around. Apply for a credit card if you have to. As long as you have a job and no bad debts, you should be able to pull that off.
Next is leather everything; jacket, gloves and boots. When my girlfriend rides with me, she wears a leather jacket/helmet/boots regardless of how hot it is outside. It's actually one of my requirements for passengers.
Although I got my first street bike at 21 years old, some 27 years ago, I had a layoff of over 10 years before I got the Savage in March. My gf had to wait for a while to ride with me. Even now, I'll ride mostly on back roads with her, through farm land with very little traffic. Her life is in my hands. Should anything happen to her while she's a passenger on my bike, regardless of who's at fault, I would hate myself. Not to mention her brother, sister-in-law, little nephew, mother, father, aunts, uncles and cousins hating me also ....you get the idea.
Reality is that we can die at very slow speeds on a bike. Getting into an accident in a car, we have the protection of the cage around us. Going down on a bike our bodies get hit, and, we're usually lying on the road which can cause us to get run over to boot. It's a bloody mess.
How we react to potentially fatal situations take time. I've had a few already, and was lucky that I was riding alone. It takes a long time for our reactions to become second nature, and even then the outcome is a crapshoot. There's no worse feeling in the world than going down hard on a bike. The cost for medical treatment, as said, will break you if you don't have insurance.
Be responsible to yourself and your passenger. Take a state run course first and foremost, and heed the suggestions/comments here.