no, you dont id you cant afford: you can buy with fiat or exchange some other resources or wokr directly for ecash, like you can use $ without depositing gold in a bank. 
Then, when you exceed the amount that is ok to have in a bank you can buy a some liquidity for a non-custodial channel by some provider and start your stack. If, at some point, you will reach an amout that have sense to detain in a on-chain utxo, you can swap.

Today bitcoiners joined ecash by the path:
on-chain ----> lightning ----> ecash 

but in the future the path would be probably the opposite, and I think would be a good way to scale bitcoin adoption, with ecash neo-banks replacing old banks. 

 So, we replaced bank brand old  with bank brand new. 

The future of finance is here! 

 I updated my reply with why I think is actually cool.