Yes, you can buy coins instead of cloud mining. My guess is that the best opportunity for cloud mining is if the price of the coin is stable. In this case, the mining difficulty shouldn't increase too much and you would still get a yearly ROI of about 10-15% (Only a guess).  If you believe the BTC/USD price will continue to rise as the latest half year you better keep your coins probably.

OK, for home mining you need to buy and maintain your equipment yourself. One important factor to consider is of course what your electricity bill is per kWh. You can always check www.coinwarz.com for general mining profitabilities. You also probably want to connect to a mining pool and there is also a mining pool fee. A mining pool is a collection of home miners that work together to solve the cryptographic problems. The rewarded Bitcoins are equally and proportional shared among the members of the mining pool. To summarize you need to understand the hardware cost, mining pool cost and electricity cost. You will receive a small amount of Bitcoin each time your pool solve the cryptographic problem for a block. Also, some mining pools distribute transaction fees (look this up).

because cloud mining keeps the source of the coins anonymous.  For example, you can give genesis mining a fake name and email address.   The only thing legit you need to give them is a form of payment and an address to send the coins to.  
Now you have a source of coins coming to you that will not be reported to the IRS.