One thing to consider when choosing a soldering iron is whether you can get replacement tips and parts. The well-known brands like Weller may be a bit more expensive, but they are also widely carried, removing that issue.
The Hakko irons are well regarded, but both the irons and tips are widely cloned. If you're buying outside official channels there's a real risk you won't get the genuine thing. The clones mostly work fine, but you could save some money by going directly to the clone brands (eg. the Aoyue irons that are popular among the maker crowd are basically clones of older Hakko gear).
If you're planning on probing high voltages or mains you should stay away from the cheapest multimeters just for personal safety, otherwise pretty much anything should do. If you're really interested, watch some old EEVblog
multimeter reviews to get an idea what to watch out for. Fluke meters are very good, but also expensive and quite frankly overkill. On the plus side they're so well built you can pick up a beat-up second-hand old meter for relatively cheap and still expect it to work almost as good as new.
