Hi,

The great news is you live in LA. I can just imagine the availability of equipment available on the used market, and of course it won't take long to sell off what you don't want to keep.

Frankly I wouldn't put a great deal of thought into what guitar. I always go with what turns me on at the time. Mistakes can be quickly sorted out especially in your market. You already play so you will know if the guitar is playable once you pick it up.

I would suggest an effects board like a G3N or similar. Dirt cheap these days and no need for a bunch of pedals kicking around. I would almost take a stab at $100 in your market would get you a good used effects board. And as you mentioned you can run headphones from them. But as manX suggest, I would still get an amp.

Any small modeling amp like the ones manX describes are great and again available really cheap. In my office I keep a Roland Cube bought off our local music swap for $80. My guess in LA is $200 for a good used board and small practise amp.

I do suggest headphones. There are times I want to play along to a jam track and it's just not possible to turn the amp up to where I want to hear it without effecting others so I plug the jam track into my amp or them through my board and out to my headphones. Which does remind me, you may want to ensure the amp you buy has an aux input. Pretty common these days but if you are going used there will be older amps on the market that don't have it. Instead they used RCA type jacks. Very inconvenient these days. If you have an iPhone with no earphone output you can still run it into an amp or board by getting a Bluetooth receiver that will plug into the aux input. $20ish new.

Good luck.