Performance Upgrades at a affordable price?

Im new to the LS-1 community personally as far as my own ride, but Ive grown up around fast car. Being Im at the you competitive age where showing your bravado is necessary, I am in search of ways to soup up my car and take on the majority of import garb, but not kill myself in the process. Now I was leaning towards a supercharger or a set of ls-2 heads but either of those would take time to save up money and acquire. Or I even looked at getting a programmer to unlock my cars stock potential. Any suggestions would be helpful.

Start off with a lid SLP makes a good one but there is also Wisper and many others. Do all the free Mods like throttlebody bypass, free ram air, EGR!, Ported MAF, and Ported Throttlebody, ect. you can see how to do all of these at Installuniversity.com. then A short stick is always a good low priced investment. Headers Off road y pipe and cat back all make a difference. Also mabe look into a good programer. These are all safe mods which will keep your budget down. After that you start getting into heads and Cams then maybe the bottle and turbo or supercharger. Remember that if your putting alot of ponies to the pavment you might want to look into a 12 bolt or 9" rear, and sub frame connectors. but I would at leadst do lid, free mods and headers before supercharger.

welcome, First mods I would suggest is allow your car to breathe, More air in your engine means more power coming out of it. But you need to allow it to exit just as well as it comes in. Put a new air lid, K&N filter, New MAF sensor, then put some long tube headers on and an off road y -pipe ( if you don't have to deal with emissions) then a good cat-back exhaust (I would recomend Borla or Magnaflow).
Then do some suspension upgrades. Keeping your rear end planted instead of wheel hopping is important and adding this stuff will drasticly improve that as well as your handleing. The better traction you get, the quicker you are. A new tubular torque arm with poly bushings, new tubular pandhard bar, new tubular rear lower control arms, a strut tower brace. Adding subframe connectors( this is a must do item). Changing your rear end ratio adds a huge difference (allthough the stock 10 bolt is a piece of crap, I would say save your money for a ford 9" and run 3.90 or 4.10 gears for a manuel and 3.73 for an auto.)
I have a predator programmer for my car, They are nice for mild tuning and can help with calibrating your speedometer for rear end ratio changes, disableing your skip shift,lets you change when your fans come on and off. + the good thing about predator, you can get custom tunes from predator when you start moding and download them from their website and then plug into your car, Very cool feature.
After that you can start getting into cam/head/intake/throttlebody/supercharger packages. Starting off with a new cam without doing the first mods listed is defeating the purpose. Hope this helps and Welcome!!!

Leave the tuning to somebody that knows how to do it. Your best money spent will be a dyno tune on your car. The only thing I have ever tried to unlocked the potential on fried my CPU and the company that sold me the handheld tuner bought me a new CPU. I returned the tuner where I bought from and will never recommend to anybody to buy a handheld tuner again. Like everybody telling you. Get you a new airfilter lid for your car. Don't be fooled by the claims of the Smooth Bellows/AIT Resisters, plastic throttle body insert VELOCITY CONES, If your an automatic get you a Vigalante 32-3400 rpm stall and a set of 3.73 thick gears. A good set of tires are worth their weight in gold. If your running street tires and the ass end of your car tries to pass you when you hit 2nd gear, then you need to invest in some better rubber for the back. Take the time to fill out your signature so people know what you have and they can help you a whole lot better!!!