If you spend your $500 on a complete kit, you will get one pretty good telescope, one (maybe two) fair-to-middling eyepieces, and one cheap mount that can hardly hold your telescope.
You are asking about telescopes, but everyone here knows by now from hard lessons that the mount is more important than the telescope. If you spend your $500 on a complete kit, you will get one pretty good telescope, one (maybe two) fair-to-middling eyepieces, and one cheap mount that can hardly hold your telescope. Honest. They're all like that. After a few years and few thousand dollars, most people go the other way and buy the mount they should have gotten for the best telescope they have now to go with the better eyepieces that made viewing most rewarding.