I don't know what kleinbl00 meant, but I certainly didn't take away the same thing from his post as you did.

Someone who knows what they're doing isn't necessarily a professional, it could just be a friend of yours that has some recording experience.

However, I think the main point, which would also be my advice, is that you should experiment a bit yourself, and try things out to learn about the process. This doesn't mean get time in a professional studio, it means get some simple, but functional equipment that you can use at home, and start small.

For software, I personally make music, so I don't know exactly what you would need, but if you want to keep it above board and buy it, I've heard good things about Reaper, which only costs $60. A free alternative is Audacity, which is probably a bit less user friendly than commercial software, but it's certainly functional, and has a lot of available effects. The biggest downside with Audacity for me is that its effects are mainly not real time, that is you don't just drop a plug-in on the track and hear its effects immediately, you usually input the settings into the effect, and then apply the processing, which then permanently changes the recorded audio (you can still undo).

For equipment, you would need either an audio interface to plug your microphone directly into your computer, or a hard disk recorder of some kind. I recommend looking into M-Audio, since they make stuff that is pretty cheap, and still fairly good.

If you want to rent, I have never done that myself, so I don't know, but it's fair to point out that if you just buy cheap equipment, your recording will obviously sound less good in the end. For practice, though, owning your own equipment is a lot simpler, and you will have time to learn. You can still do a lot of things with cheap equipment, and as long as your recording is halfway compentent, the content will be the most important thing, rather than the production value.

You will have to invest a lot of time in order to learn how to do it yourself, but that doesn't mean it's impossible, and it's very satisfying. The reason you should start small is that you'll probably make something crappy the first time you try, and then you'll learn from that experience and make something better next time.

Good luck!