With a '97 there is a decent chance that the added stress could cause one of your shocks to blow early. While this won't render the car undriveable, it will certainly make the ride punishing. I say buy the springs now and wait to put them on until you can afford shocks (unless that is really far into the future.) The labor required to change out the shocks/springs is enough of a pain to do once, much less twice.

Also, definitely get an alignment. I'm running Eiback pro-kit springs with KYB AGX shocks. I slacked off on getting an alignment until about a year after I installed them :doh:. While my camber wasn't bad at all (-1.2 degrees), I had a couple degrees of toe out -- which made my car handle pretty well, but made it scary twitchy on the highway and burned a set of kuhmos down to the cords in less than 8000 miles.